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In the beginning, there is perfect Power, Power with a Thousand Faces: pharaoh, padishah, emperor, king, Lord Protector, Generalissimo, El Presidente. Power pure and uninterrupted. We have but to think the word and it is so. We are in a world apart, protected by G*d, by ritual, by blades and dumb muscle. Nothing enters save by Our permission, and then only when stripped naked, bound, and bowing. This is the perfect relation of perfect power: absolute and absolutely asymmetric.

While we have him questioned, Our leading economist relates a report, recently received, tying the wealth of nations to their connectivity. The people need no one else, he tells Me with his dying breath, but We need the money. He spoke the truth: We need the instruments of Power to reinforce Our reality, and these do not come cheaply. Our remaining advisers, chastened and respectful, suggest beginning with television – projecting Our Presence into the homes of Our people – and an auction (to Our most loyal friends) of radio spectrum suitable for mobile communication.

Our eyes, downcast, unable to look upon the Power except in its perfect portraits, had never seen the frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command that cameras captured, passions read and broadcast: a heart that mocked us, a hand always raised in reproach, as if we, ungrateful children, needed the constant admonition of the rod. This plain as nakedness: all the smooth words of newscasters, commentators, spokespeople and ministers could not remove that stain from Power. Each thought ourselves alone in this treason, and quickly burying it beneath other, safer thoughts.

Hidden truths undermine us in our humour, moments of lèse majesté, whispered giggles hidden behind our hands, scribbled graffiti above the pissoir, so shocking they made us gasp, and then, thereafter, we knew them as truth. Other lines joined them, more foul, funny, shocking and true, a vast fabric of written rebellion, expressions of everything we had always known. On the day the first text message arrives, with a joke that could get us killed, we delete it – though not before we forward it along to a few of our friends, who send it along, who send it along. Suddenly the secret insult is common knowledge.

**

Those who mock Us seek to destroy Us. Those loyal to Us scrub treasonous filth from walls and streets. We secure and question anyone nearby, their confessions Our entry points into a hidden nest of radicals, revolutionaries, and anarchists. These We monitor closely, tapping their mobiles, looking to whom they contact, building a map from these connections, tracing the outlines of their conspiracies. Our friends who own the telcos willingly hand over the information which spell out comings and goings of these traitors. In one sudden strike we take them, whole, to summary judgement. Treason troubles us no more.

They came in the night, roused us from sleep, and took him away. We never saw him again. Without a body, how could we mourn? How could we bury our grief? We could not speak of it, lest we ourselves disappear. Someone – we know not whom – set up a memorial on Facebook, inviting those who knew him to share themselves. We stayed away, but were told that one, then two, five, ten, fifteen, fifty, hundreds and finally uncountable thousands came to share; those who knew him, and those who only knew what he believed in. We were afraid, but content.

Those who love traitors are traitors themselves. We have no love for them, but We are thankful for their foolishness. Facebook reveals them to Us, and everyone they know. Treason breeds treason. Traitors hang together. We friend, and listen, and draw another map of another conspiracy until the picture, finely detailed, demands action. Another night of gathering, judgement and cleansing. This ends that. There are not even whispers against Us.

Internet dating – has there been a greater invention? Men and women who would not normally find one another can seek each other out in the privacy of their own homes. Here, this one is pretty. Such lovely green eyes. And what a lovely green jacket. And beautiful fingers, held up in such an attractive pose, count them: one, two. And the photo, taken in the Capitol Square? How interesting. I’ll tell all my friends that I have a date, a Green Date, in Capitol Square, on the 2nd. Yes. I’ll tell them all. They’ll want a date as well.

***

Inconceivable! They gather in My capitol, in My square, in their tens of thousands, to make demands. Impudence! They should thank the heavens for their homes and daily bread. Ingratitude! By what witchcraft have they come together? We tapped the phones, blocked the websites, and still they come, in their hundreds of thousands. Some advise it must all be unplugged – at once – but others tell Us we have grown too dependent on the network. Flip the switch, and We blind Ourselves, dragging Our loyal subjects into darkness, Our economy into ruin. But the storm must be stopped, the plug pulled.

It didn’t surprise us when the network failed: half amazed it took so long. We found ourselves thrown back into another time: before instantly, before everywhere, before all-at-once. But lessons learned lingered, taking on different forms: graffiti in hidden places, posters in public, chalk laid out on the sidewalk so anyone could add their own voice, so we could to move together, in unity. This grew into a code: jumbled letters and numbers in text messages and spray painted street signs, which told us where and when.

And still they keep coming, in their millions. How? Without eyes to see and ears to hear, how do they know? Our friends grow concerned, see Us sinking beneath this rising storm, but We apprehend the root of Our troubles, and will root it out. This all began when We foolishly permitted our people to connect. That must now stop, to preserve Us. Against the wishes of My friends – who will lose their fortunes so We might maintain control – We have mobile networks shut down, and wait for the inevitable collapse, as those against Us lose contact.

It took a few moments to realize that these handheld lifelines had become useless lumps of silicon and plastic. It seemed like silence had descended in the midst of the crowd. Then someone said, ‘Here, take this’, and gave me something that brought my mobile back to life, allowed it to connect with everyone else in the crowd, and to the world beyond. In lieu of thanks I was asked to pass it along, and did, with the same instruction, so it spread like wildfire. We could see around the tanks, around the police, around everything, moving faster, moving everywhere, moving NOW.

The guards join with us as we storm the palace.

****

We The People, in order to form a more perfect union, choose from amongst ourselves those fit to represent our franchise. The elections, free, fair and hard-fought, divide, inevitably, along a spectrum from left to right. But whatever ideology, no one argues the need to reframe power as governance, making a mystery of the obvious, placing it beyond reproach. Power – however dressed – draws those who lust for it, who benefit from the application of it, and this, too obvious, would ruin everything, igniting another Revolution. In secrecy and silence, safety.

You can only be told ‘No!’ so many times before the blood begins to boil and overflows into action. They’ll let us march in the streets now, but leave us impotent at the seats of government, demanding ‘process’ and ‘decorum’. How can we be polite as our future is stolen away? This shell of democracy – perfect in form but crowded with corruption – needs to be punctured, so the rot beneath the skin can be exposed and excised. Thankfully, someone with conscience – sick to death with the stench of power – comes forward with evidence enough to condemn everyone, bringing them down.

Madness! How can anything be stable when everything is exposed? How can we guide the nation into prosperity with saboteurs underfoot? Incredible. The government will go on, will nail down roof nearly shorn off by these ‘revelations’. We will ensure those who work for the government remain true to it: by oath and affirmation, surveillance and monitoring, force of law and pain of imprisonment. Only when guaranteed privacy can we work to preserve the continued security of the nation. It’s in these moments our democracy proves itself supple enough to meet the challenges of our times. We can all congratulate ourselves on a crisis successfully overcome.

They threw him in jail – of course – claiming espionage, charging treason, crying for his head. The message was clear, and silence descended, a curtain protecting them from us. Behind it, they grow deaf and arrogant, manufacturing a managed dissent, bringing their full power down upon on anything else. Still, a friend showed me something: a magic box. Anything placed into that box finds finds its way to magazine editors and newspaper reporters and bloggers and loudmouthed radicals, no questions asked, in perfect anonymity. That could prove irresistible.

*****

If secrets they want, secrets they shall have, by the hundreds of thousands, a tsunami broken silences, signifying nothing. All of the effluvia and trivia of state, dressed up as meaning, each item seeming significant, demanding more attention than even a planet of mischief-makers, continuously clicking through pages, could possibly hope to digest. Let them chew on that as the government draws these paranoids closer, tantalizing them with the shadows of conspiracies, just beyond the horizons of reason, yet believable enough that they will inevitably overreach into folly. As they implode in a ruin of accusations and mistrust, the government will step in, bringing order to chaos, carrying on as before.

Do I know you? How do I know you? Who knows you that I know?

We have two choices before us: closely bound, connected at a thousand points of past and presence; or atomized, invisible, and ANONYMOUS. On one hand, the tribe; on the other, legion. The tribe is loyal, safe and steadfast, the legion strong, but mercurial and diffident. We can subvert from within, or pervert from without. In the right circumstances, we might even do both at once. We might not always get our way, but we can resist, redirect, repurpose, and sometimes win. Success is our greatest threat: the enemy learns, and nothing works twice.

Credentials, please. Access granted. You are now logged into the government. You will need to re-authorize your credentials every fifteen minutes to prevent unauthorized access. Today’s status report: sixty-five percent of systems are functioning normally; twenty percent are undergoing integrity checks, ten percent are under persistent attack, and five percent are compromised. As a security measure your access has been temporarily restricted. Please confine your activities to the indicated systems. WARNING: There has been an intrusion detection. All system access has been restricted until further notice. Thank you and have a nice day!

I ask for a password. It comes along a few hours later, buried in the back-end bits of a cute little image of a wet kitten. That’s a start, enough to log in. But what then, as the network watches my every move, measuring me against the real person behind this account? How should I behave? I whisper. Just above the throbbing dubstep soundtrack of this shooter, my fellow players feed me replies which could be actions within the gameworld – or something else entirely. I make my moves, as advised, and when I see WARNING: There has been an intrusion detection, I know we have won.

In a few days time, it will be exactly thirty-two years – a bit more than a billion seconds – since I learned to code. I was lucky enough to attend a high school with its own DEC PDP 11/45, and lucky that it chose to offer computer science courses on a few VT-52 video terminals and a DECWriter attached to it. My first OS was RSTS/E, and my first programming language was – of course – BASIC.

A hundred million seconds before this, a friend dragged me over to a data center his dad managed, sat me down at a DECWriter, typed ‘startrek’ at the prompt, and it was all over. The damage had been done. From that day, all I’ve ever wanted to do is play with computers.

I’ve pretty much been able to keep to that.

Oddly, the only time I didn’t play with computers was at MIT. After MIT, when I began work as a software engineer, I got to play and get paid for it. I’ve written code for every major microprocessor family (with the exception of the 6502), all the common microcontrollers, and every OS from CP/M to Android. I’ve even written a batch-executed RPG II program, typed up on punched cards, exectuted on an IBM 370 mainframe.

(Shudder, shudder.)

At Christmas 1990, I sat down and read a novel published a few years before, by an up-and-coming science fiction writer. That novel – Neuromancer – changed my life. It gave me a vision that I would pursue for an entire decade: a three-dimensional, immersive, visualized Internet. Cyberspace. I dropped everything, moved myself to San Francisco – epicenter of all work in virtual reality – and founded a startup to design and market an inexpensive immersive videogaming console. It was hard work, frequently painful, and I managed to pour my life savings into the company before it went belly up. But I can’t say that any of the other VR companies faired any better. A few of them still exist, shadows of their former selves, selling specialty products into the industrial market.

These companies failed because each of them – my own among them – coveted the whole prize. With the eyes of a megalomaniac, each firm was going to ‘rule the world’. Each did lots of inventing, holding onto every scrap of invention with IP agreements and copyrights and all sorts of patents. I invented a technology very much similar to that seen in the Wiimote, but fourteen years before the Wiimote was introduced. It’s all patented. I don’t own it. After my company collapsed the patent went through a series of other owners, until eventually I found myself in a lawyer’s office, being deposed, because my patent – the one I didn’t actually own – was involved in a dispute over priority, theft of intellectual property, and other violations.

Lovely.

With the VR industry in ruins, I set about creating my own networked VR protocol, using a parser donated by my friend Tony Parisi, building upon work from a coder over in Switzerland, a bloke by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, who’d published reams and reams of (gulp) Objective-C code, preprocessed into ANSI C, implementing his new Hypertext Transport Protocol. I took his code, folded it into my own, and rapidly created a browser for three-dimensional scenes attached to Berners-Lee’s new-fangled World Wide Web.

This happened seventeen years ago this week. Half a billion seconds ago.

When I’d gotten my 3D browser up and running, I was faced with a choice: I could try to hold it tight, screaming ‘Mine! Mine! Mine!’ and struggle for attention, or I could promiscuously share my code with the world. Being the attention-seeking type that I am, the choice was easy. After Dave Raggett – the father of HTML – had christened my work ‘VRML’, I published the source code. A community began to form around the project. With some help from an eighteen year-old sysadmin at WIRED named Brian Behlendorf, I brought Silicon Graphics to the table, got them to open their own code, and we had a real specification to present at the 2nd International Conference on the World Wide Web. VRML was off and running, precisely because it was open to all, free to all, available to all.

It took about a billion seconds of living before I grokked the value of open source, the penny-drop moment I realized that a resource shared is a resource squared. I owe everything that came afterward – my careers as educator, author, and yes, panelist on The New Inventors – to that one insight. Ever since then, I’ve tried to give away nearly all of my work: ideas, articles, blog posts, audio and video recordings of my talks, slide decks, and, of course, lots of source code. The more I give away, the richer I become – not just or even necessarily financially. There are more metrics to wealth than cash in your bank account, and more ways than one to be rich. Just as there is more than one way to be good, and – oh yeah – more than one way to be evil.

Which brings us to my second penny-drop moment, which came after I’d been programming computers for almost a billion seconds…

I: ZOMFG 574LLm4N W45 r19H7!

Sometimes, the evil we do, we do to ourselves. For about half a billion seconds between the ages of nineteen and thirty nine, I smoked tobacco, until I realized that anyone who smokes past the age of forty is either a fool or very poorly informed. So I quit. It took five years and many, many, many boxes of nicotine chewing gum, but I’m clean.

A few years ago, Harvard researcher Dr. Nicholas Christakis published some interesting insights on how the behavior of smoking spreads. It’s not the advertising – that’s mostly banned, these days – but because we take cues from our peers. If our friends start smoking, we ourselves are more likely to start smoking. There’s a communicative relationship, almost an epidemiological relationship at work here. This behavior is being transmitted by mimesis – imitation. We’re the imitating primates, so good at imitating one another that we can master language and math and xkcd. When we see our friends smoking, we want to smoke. We want to fit in. We want to be cool. That’s what it feels like inside our minds, but really, we just want to imitate. We see something, and we want to do it. This explains Jackass.

Mimesis is not restricted to smoking. Christakis also studied obesity, and found that it showed the same ‘network’ effects. If you are surrounded by the obese people, chances are greater that you will be obese. If your peers starts slimming, chances are that you will join them in dieting. The boundaries of mimesis are broad: we can teach soldiers to kill by immersing them in an environment where everyone learns to kill; we can teach children to read by immersing them in an environment where everyone learns to read; we can stuff our faces with Maccas and watch approvingly as our friends do the same. We have learned to use mimesis to our advantage, but equally it makes us its slaves.

Recent research has shown something disturbing: divorce spreads via mimesis. If you divorce, its more likely that your friends will also split up. Conversely, if your friends separate, it’s more likely that your marriage will dissolve. Again, this makes sense – you’re observing the behavior of your peers and imitating it, but here it touches the heart, the core of our being.

Booting up into Homo Sapiens Sapiens meant the acquisition of a facility for mimesis as broadly flexible as the one we have for language. These may even be two views into the same cognitive process. We can imitate nearly anything, but what we choose to imitate is determined by our network of peers, that set of relationships which we now know as our ‘social graph’.

This is why one needs to choose one’s friends carefully. They are not just friends, they are epidemiological vectors. When they sneeze, you will catch a cold. They are puppet masters, pulling your strings, even if they are blissfully unaware of the power they have over you – or the power that you have over them.

All of this is interesting, but little of it has the shock of the new. Our mothers told us to exercise caution when selecting our friends. We all know people who got in with the ‘wrong crowd’, to see their lives ruined as a consequence. This is common knowledge, and common sense.

But things are different today. Not because the rules have changed – those seem to be eternal – but because we have extended ourselves so suddenly and so completely. Our very new digital ‘social networks’ recapitulate the ones between our ears, in one essential aspect – they become channels for communication, channels through which the messages of mimesis can spread. Viral videos – and ‘viral’ behavior in general – are good examples of this.

Digital social networks are instantaneous, ubiquitous and can be vastly larger than the hundred-and-fifty-or-so limit imposed on our endogenous social networks, the functional bandwidth of the human neocortex. Just as computers can execute algorithms tens of millions of times faster than we can, digital social networks can inflate to elephantine proportions, connecting us to thousands of others.

Most of us keep our social graphs much smaller; the average number of friends on any given user account on Facebook is around 35. That’s small enough that it resembles your endogenous social network, so the same qualities of mimesis come into play. When your connections start talking about a movie or a song or a television series, you’re more to become interested in it.

If this is all happening on Facebook – which it normally is – there is another member of your social graph, there whether you like it or not: Facebook itself. You choose to build your social graph by connecting to others within Facebook, store your social graph on Facebook’s servers, and communicate within Facebook’s environment. All of this has been neatly captured, providing an opening for Facebook to do what they will with your social graph.

You have friended Mark Zuckerberg, telling him everything about yourself that you have ever told to any of your friends. More, actually, because an analysis of your social graph reveals much about you that you might not want to ever reveal to anyone else: your sexual preference and fetishes, your social class, your income level – everything that you might choose to hide is entirely revealed because you need to reveal it in order to make Facebook work. Because you do not own it. Because you do not have access to the source code, or the databases. Because it is closed.

Your social graph is the most important thing you have that can be represented in bits. With it, I can manipulate you. I can change your tastes, your attitudes, even your politics. We now know this is possible – and probably even easy. But to do this, I need your social graph. I need you to surrender it to me before I can use it to fuck you over.

We didn’t understand any of this a quarter billion seconds ago, when Friendster went live. Now we have a very good idea of the potency of the social graph, but we find ourselves almost pathetically addicted to the amplified power of communication provided by Facebook. We want to quit it, but we just don’t know how. Just as with tobacco, going cold turkey won’t be easy.

On 28 May 2010, I killed my Facebook profile and signed off once and for all. There is a cost – I’m missing a lot of the information which exists solely within the walled boundaries of Facebook – but I also breathe a bit easier knowing that I am not quite the puppet I was. When someone asks why I quit – an explanation which has taken me over a thousand words this morning – they normally just close down the conversation with, “My grandmother is on Facebook. I have to be there.”

That may be our epitaph.

We are so fucked. We ended up here because we surrendered our most vital personal details to a closed-source system. We should have known better.

And that’s only the half of it.

So much has happened in the last eight weeks that we’ve almost forgotten that before all of this disaster and tragedy afflicted Queensland, we were obsessed with another sort of disaster, rolling out in slow-motion, like a car smash from inside the car. On 29 November 2010, Wikileaks, in conjunction with several well-respected newspapers, began to release the first few of a quarter million cables, written by US State Department officials throughout the world. The US Government did its best to laugh these off as inconsequential, but one has already led more-or-less directly to a revolution in Tunisia. We also know that Hilary Clinton has requested credit card numbers and DNA samples for all of the UN ambassadors in New York City, presumably so she can raise up a clone army of diplomats intent on identity theft. Not a good look.

In early December, as the first cables came to light, and their contents ricocheted through the mediasphere, the US government recognized that it had to act – and act quickly – to staunch the flow of leaks. The government had some help, because an individual seduced by the United States’ projection of power decided to mount a Distributed Denial of Service attack against the Wikileaks website. In the name of freedom. Or liberty. Or something.

Wikileaks went down, but quickly relocated its servers into Amazon.com’s EC2 cloud. This lasted until US Senator Joseph Lieberman started making noises. Wikileaks was quickly turfed out of EC2, with Amazon claiming newly discovered violations of its Terms of Service. Another ‘discovery’ of a violation followed in fairly short order with Wikileaks’ DNS provider, everyDNS. For the coup de gras, PayPal had a look at their own terms of service – and, quelle horreur! – found Wikileaks in violation, freezing Wikileaks accounts, which, at that time, must have been fairly overflowing with contributions.

Deprive them of servers, deprive them of name service, deprive them of funds: checkmate. The Powers That Be must have thought this could dent the forward progress of Wikileaks. In fact, it only caused the number of copies of the website and associated databases to multiply. Today, nearly two thousand webservers host mirrors of Wikileaks. Like striking at a dandelion, attacking it only causes the seed to spread with the winds.

Although Wikileaks successfully resumed its work releasing the cables, the entire incident proved one ugly, mean, nasty point: the Internet is fundamentally not free. Where we thought we breathed the pure air of free speech and free thought, we instead find ourselves severely caged. If we do something that upsets our masters too much, they bring the bars down upon us, leaving us no breathing room at all. That isn’t liberty. That is slavery.

This isn’t some hypothetical. This isn’t a paranoid fantasy. This is what is happening. It will happen again, and again, and again, whenever the State or forces in collusion with the State find themselves threatened. None of it is secure. None of it belongs to us. None of it is free.

This is why we are so truly and wholly fucked. This is why we must stop and rethink everything we are doing. This is why we must consider ourselves victims of another kind of disaster, another tragedy, and must equally and bravely confront another kind of rebuilding. Because if we do not create something new, if we do not restore what is broken, we surrender to the forces of control.

Like it or not, we find ourselves at war. It’s not a war we asked for. It’s not a war we wanted. But war is upon us, the last great gasp of the forces of control as they realize that when they digitized, in pursuit of greater efficiency, profit, or extensions of their own power, whatever they once held onto became so fluid it now drains away completely.

That’s one enemy, the old enemy, the ones whom history has already ruled irrelevant. But there’s the other enemy, who seeks to exteriorize the interior, to make privacy difficult and therefore irrelevant. Without privacy there is no liberty. Without privacy there is no individuality. Without privacy there is only the mindless, endless buzzing of the hive. That’s the new enemy. Although it announces itself with all of the hyperbole of historical inevitability, this is just PR aimed at extending the monopoly power of these forces.

We need weapons. Lots of weapons. I’m not talking about the Low Orbit Ion Cannon. Rather, I’m recommending a layered defensive strategy, one which allows us to carry on with our business, blithely unmolested by the forces which seek to constrain us.

Here, then, is my ‘Design Guide for Anarchists’:

Design Principle One: Distribute Everything

The recording industry used the courts to shut down Napster because they could. Napster had a single throat they could get their legal arms around, choking the life out of it. In a display of natural selection that would have brought a tear to Alfred Russel Wallace’s eye, the selection pressure applied by the recording industry only led to the creation of Gnutella, which, through its inherently distributed architecture, became essentially impossible to eradicate. The Day of the Darknet had begun.

This is an extension of the essential UNIX idea of simple programs which can be piped together to do useful things. ‘Small pieces, loosely joined.’ But these pieces shouldn’t live within a single process, a single processor, a single computer, or a single subnet. They must live everywhere they can live, in every compatible environment, so that they can survive any of the catastrophes of war.

Design Principle Two: Transport Independence

The inundation of Brisbane and its surrounding suburbs brought a sudden death to all of its networks: mobile, wired, optic. All of these networks are centralized, and for that reason they can all be turned off – either by a natural disaster, or at the whim of The Powers That Be. Just as significantly, they require the intervention of those Powers to reboot them: government and telcos had to work hand-in-hand to bring mobile service back to the worst-affected suburbs. So long as you are in the good graces of the government, it can be remarkably efficient. But if you find yourself aligned against your government, or your government is afflicted with corruption, as simple a thing as a dial tone can be almost impossible to manifest.

We have created a centralized communications infrastructure. Lines feed into trunks, which feed into central offices, which feed into backbones. This seems the natural order of things, but it is entirely an echo of the commercial requirements of these networks. In order to bill you, your communications must pass through a point where they can be measured, metered and tariffed.

There is another way. Years before the Internet came along, we used UUCP and FidoNet to spread mail and news posts throughout a far-flung, only occasionally connected global network of users. It was slower than we’re used to these days, but no less reliable. Messages would forward from host to host, until they reached their intended destination. It all worked if you had a phone line, or an Internet connection, or, well, pretty much anything else. I presume that a few hardy souls printed out a UUCP transmission on paper tape, physically carried it from one host to another, and fed it through.

A hierarchy is efficient, but the price of that efficiency is vulnerability. A rhizomatic arrangement of nodes within a mesh is slow, but very nearly invulnerable. It will survive flood, fire, earthquake and revolution. To abolish these dangerous hierarchies, we must reconsider everything we believe about ‘the right way’ to get bits from point A to point B. Every transport must be considered – from point-to-point laser beams to wide-area mesh networks using unlicensed spectrum down to semaphore and smoke signals. Nothing is too slow, only too unreliable. If we rely on TCP/IP and HTTP exclusively, we risk everything for the sake of some speed and convenience. But this is life during wartime, and we must shoulder this burden.

Design Principle Three: Secure Everything

Why would any message traverse a public network in plaintext? The bulk of our communication occurs in the wide open – between Web browsers and Web servers, email servers and clients, sensors and their recorders. This is insanity. It is not our job to make things easy to read for ASIO or the National Security Agency or Google or Facebook or anyone else who has some need to know what we’re saying and what we’re thinking.

As a baseline, everything we do, everywhere, must be transmitted with strong encryption. Until someone perfects a quantum computer, that’s our only line of defense.

We need a security approach that is more comprehensive than this. The migration to cloud computing – driven by its ubiquity and convenience, and baked into Google’s Chrome OS – deprives us of any ability to secure our own information. When we use Gmail or Flickr or Windows Live or MobileMe or even Dropbox (which is better than most, as it stores everything encrypted), we surrender our security for a little bit of simplicity. This is a false trade-off. These systems are insecure because it benefits those who offer these systems to the public. There is value in all of that data, so everything is exposed, leaving us exposed.

If you do not know where it lives, if you do not hold the keys to lock it or release it, if it affects to be more pretty than useful (because locks are ugly), turn your back on it, and tell the ones you love – who do not know what you know – to do the same. Then, go and build systems which are secure, which present nothing but a lock to any prying eyes.

Design Principle Four: Open Everything

I don’t need to offer any detailed explanation for this last point: it is the reason we are here. If you can’t examine the source code, how can you really trust it? This is an issue beyond maintainability, beyond the right to fork; this is the essential element that will prevent paranoia. ‘Transparency is the new objectivity’, and unless any particular program is completely transparent, it is inherently suspect.

Open source has the additional benefit that it can be reused and repurposed; the parts for one defensive weapon can rapidly be adapted to another one, so open source accelerates the responses to new threats, allowing us to stay one step ahead of the forces who are attempting to close all of this down. There’s a certain irony here: in order to compete effectively with us, those who oppose us will be forced to open their own source, to accelerate their own responses to our responses. On this point we must win, simply because open source improves selection fitness.

When all four of these design principles are embodied in a work, another design principle emerges: resilience. Something that is distributed, transport independent, secure and open is very, very difficult to subvert, shut down, or block. It will survive all sorts of disasters. Including warfare. It will adapt at lightning speed. It makes the most of every possible selection advantage. But nothing is perfect. Systems engineered to these design principles will be slower than those built purely for efficiency. The more immediacy you need, the less resilience you get. Sometimes immediacy will overrule other design principles. Such trade-offs must be carefully thought through.

Is all of this more work? Yes. But then, building an automobile that won’t kill its occupants at speed is a lot more work than slapping four wheels and a gear train on a paper mache box. We do that work because we don’t want our loved ones hurtling toward their deaths every time they climb behind the wheel. Freedom ain’t free, and ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.’

Let me take a few minutes to walk you through the design of my own open-source project, so you can see how these design principles have influenced my own work.

III: Plexus

When I announced I would quit Facebook, many of my contacts held what can only be described as an ‘electronic wake’ for me, in the middle of my Facebook comment stream. As if I were about to pass away, and they’d never see me again. I kept pointing them to my Posterous blog, but they simply ignored the links, telling me how much I’d be missed once I departed. ‘But why can’t you just come visit me on Posterous?’ I asked. One contact answered for the lot when he said, ‘That’s too hard, Mark. With Facebook I can check on everyone at once. I don’t need to go over there for you, and over here for someone else, and so on and so on. Facebook makes it easy.’

That’s another epitaph. Yet it precipitated a penny-drop moment. The reason Facebook has such lock-in with its users is because of a network effect: as more people join Facebook, its utility value as a human switchboard increases. It is this access to the social graph which is Facebook’s ‘flypaper’, the reason it is so sticky, and surpassing Google as the most visited site on the Internet.

That social graph is the key thing; it’s what the address book, the rolodex and the contacts database have morphed into, and it forms the foundation for a project that I have named Plexus. Plexus is a protocol for the social web, ‘plumbing’ that allows all social web components to communicate: from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need. Some components of the social web – Facebook comes to mind – are very poor communicators. Others, like Twitter, have provided every conceivable service to make them easy to talk to.

Plexus provides a ‘meta-API’, based on RFC2822 messaging, so that each service can feed into or be fed by an individual’s social graph. This social graph, the heart of Plexus, is what we might call the ‘Web2.0 address book’. It’s not simply a static set of names, addresses, telephone numbers and emails, but, rather, an active set of connections between services, which you can choose to listen to, or to share with. This is the switchboard, where the real magic takes place, allowing you listen to or be listened to, allowing you to share, or be shared with.

Plexus is agnostic; it can talk to any service, and any service can talk to it. It is designed to ‘wire everything together’, so that we never have to worry about going hither and yon to manage our social graph, but neither need we be chained in one place. Plexus gives us as much flexibility as we require. That’s the vision.

Just after New Year, I had an insight. I had originally envisioned Plexus as a monolithic set of Python modules. It became clear that message-passing between the components – using an RFC2822 protocol – would allow me to separate the components, creating a distributed Plexus, parts of which could run anywhere: on a separate process, on a separate subnet, or, really, anywhere. Furthermore, these messages could easily be encrypted and signed using RSA encryption, creating a strong layer of security. Finally, these messages could be transmitted by any means necessary: TCP/IP, UUCP, even smoke signals. And of course, all of it is entirely open. Because it’s a protocol, the pieces of Plexus can be coded in any language anyone wants to use: Python, Node.js, PHP, Perl, Haskell, Ruby, Java, even shell. Plexus is an agreement to speak the same language about the things we want to share.

I could go into mind-numbing detail about the internals of Plexus, but I trust those of you who find Plexus intriguing will find me after I leave the stage this morning. I’m most interested in what you know that could help move this project forward: what pieces already exist that I can rework and adapt for Plexus? I need your vast knowledge, your insights and your critiques. Plexus is still coming to life, but a hundred things must go right for it to be a success. With your aid, that can happen.

The Chinese Taoist laughs at civilization and goes elsewhere.
The Babylonian Chaoist sets termites to the foundations.

Plexus is a white ant set to the imposing foundations of Facebook and every other service which chooses to take the easy path, walling its users in, the better to control them. There is another way. When the network outside the walls has a utility value greater than the network within, the forces of natural selection come into play, and those walls quickly tumble. We saw it with AOL. We saw it with MSN. We’ll see it again with Facebook. We will build the small and loosely-coupled components that individually do very little but altogether add up to something far more useful than anything on offer from any monopolist.

We need to see this happen. This is not just a game.

Conclusion: The Next Billion Seconds

A billion seconds ago, Linux did not exist. The personal computer was an expensive toy. The Internet – well, one of my friends is the sysadmin who got HP onto UUCP – this was before the Internet became pervasive – and he remembers updating his /etc/hosts file weekly – by hand. Every machine on the Internet could be found within a single file, that could be printed out on two sheets of greenbar. A billion seconds later, and we’re a few days away from IPocalypse, the total allocation of the IPv4 number space.

Something is going on.

I’m not as teleological as Kevin Kelly. I do not believe that there is evidence to support a seventh class of life – the technium – which is striving to come into its own. I don’t consider technology as something in any way separate from us. Other animals may use tools, but we have gone further, becoming synonymous with them. Our social instinct for imitation, our language instinct for communication, and our technological instinct for tool using all seem to be reaching new heights. Each instinct reinforces the others, creating a series of rising feedbacks that has only one possible end: the whole system overloads, overflows all its buffers, and – as you might expect – knocks the supervisor out of the box.

Call this a Singularity, if you like. I simply refer to it as the next billion seconds.

The epicenter of this transition, where all three streams collide, sits in the palm of our hands, nearly all the time. The mobile is the most pervasive technology in human history. People who do not have electricity or indoor plumbing or literacy or agriculture have mobiles. Perhaps five and a half billion of the planet’s seven billion souls possesses one; that’s everyone who earns more than one dollars a day. Countless studies shows that individuals with mobiles improve their economic fitness: they earn more money. Anything that improves selection fitness – and economic fitness is a big part of that – spreads rapidly, as humans imitate, as humans communicate, as humans take the tool and further it, increasing its utility, amplifying its ability to amplify economic fitness. The mobile becomes even more useful, more essential, more indispensable. A billion seconds ago, no one owned a mobile. Today, nearly everyone does.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested to make the mobile more useful, more pervasive, and more effective. The engines of capital are reorganizing themselves around it, just as they did, three billion seconds ago, for the automobile, and a billion seconds ago for the integrated circuit. But unlike the automobile or the IC, the mobile is quintessentially a social technology, a connective fabric for humanity. The next billion seconds will see this fabric become more tangible and more tightly woven, as it becomes increasingly inconceivable to separate ourselves from those we choose to share our lives with.

Call this a Hive Mind, if you like. I simply refer to it as the next billion seconds.

This is starting to push beneath our skins the way it has already colonized our attention. I don’t know that we will literally ‘Borg’ ourselves. But the strict boundaries between ourselves, our machines, and other humans are becoming blurred to the point of meaninglessness. Organisms are defined by their boundaries, by what they admit and what they refuse. In this billion seconds, we are rewriting the definition of homo sapiens sapiens, irrevocably becoming something else.

Do we own that code? Are parts of that new definition closed off from us, fenced in by the ramparts of privilege or power or capital or law? Will we end up with something foreign inside each of us, a potency unnamed, unobserved, and unavoidable? Will we be invaded, infected, and controlled? This is the choice that confronts us in the next billion seconds, a choice made even in its abrogation. Freedom is not just an ideal. Liberty is not some utopian dream. These must form the baseline human experience in our next billion seconds, or all is lost. We ourselves will be lost.

We have reached the decision point. Our actions today – here, in this room – define the future we will inhabit, the transhumanity we are emerging into. We’ve had our playtime, and it’s been good. We’ve learned a lot, but mostly we’ve learned how to discern right from wrong. We know what to do: what to build up, and what to tear down. This transition is painful and bloody and carries with it the danger of complete loss. But we have no choice. We are too far down within it to change our ways now. ‘The way down is the way up.’

Call it a birth, if you like. It awaits us within the next billion seconds.

The slides for this talk (in OpenOffice.org Impress format) are available here. They contain strong images.

On the 18th of October in 2004, a UK cable channel, SkyOne, broadcast the premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica, writer-producer Ron Moore’s inspired revisioning of the decidedly campy 70s television series. SkyOne broadcast the episode as soon as it came off the production line, but its US production partner, the SciFi Channel, decided to hold off until January – a slow month for television – before airing the episodes. The audience for Battlestar Galactica, young and technically adept, made digital recordings of the broadcasts as they went to air, cut out the commercials breaks, then posted them to the Internet.

For an hour-long television programme, a lot of data needs to be dragged across the Internet, enough to clog up even the fastest connection. But these young science fiction fans used a new tool, BitTorrent, to speed the bits on their way. BitTorrent allows a large number of computers (in this case, over 10,000 computers were involved) to share the heavy lifting. Each of the computers downloaded pieces of Battlestar Galactica, and as each got a piece, they offered it up to any other computer which wanted a copy of that piece. Like a forest of hands each trading puzzle pieces, each computer quickly assembled a complete copy of the show.

All of this happened within a few hours of Battlestar Galactica going to air. That same evening, on the other side of the Atlantic, American fans watched the very same episode that their fellow fans in the UK had just viewed. They liked what they saw, and told their friends, who also downloaded the episode, using BitTorrent. Within just a few days, perhaps a hundred thousand Americans had watched the show.

US cable networks regularly count their audience in hundreds of thousands. A million would be considered incredibly good. Executives for SciFi Channel ran the numbers and assumed that the audience for this new and very expensive TV series had been seriously undercut by this international trafficking in television. They couldn’t have been more wrong. When Battlestar Galactica finally aired, it garnered the biggest audiences SciFi Channel had ever seen – well over 3 million viewers.

How did this happen? Word of mouth. The people who had the chops to download Battlestar Galactica liked what they saw, and told their friends, most of whom were content to wait for SciFi Channel to broadcast the series. The boost given the series by its core constituency of fans helped it over the threshold from cult classic into a genuine cultural phenomenon. Battlestar Galactica has become one of the most widely-viewed cable TV series in history; critics regularly lavish praise on it, and yes, fans still download it, all over the world.

Although it might seem counterintuitive, the widespread “piracy” of Battlestar Galactica was instrumental to its ratings success. This isn’t the only example. BBC’s Dr. Who, leaked to BitTorrent by a (quickly fired) Canadian editor, drummed up another huge audience. It seems, in fact, that “piracy” is good. Why? We live in an age of fantastic media oversupply: there are always too many choices of things to watch, or listen to, or play with. But, if one of our friends recommends something, something they loved enough to spend the time and effort downloading, that carries a lot of weight.

All of this sharing of media means that the media titans – the corporations which produce and broadcast most of the television we watch – have lost control over their own content. Anything broadcast anywhere, even just once, becomes available everywhere, almost instantaneously. While that’s a revolutionary development, it’s merely the tip of the iceberg. The audience now has the ability to share anything they like – whether produced by a media behemoth, or made by themselves. YouTube has allowed individuals (some talented, some less so) reach audiences numbering in hundreds of millions. The attention of the audience, increasingly focused on what the audience makes for itself, has been draining ratings away from broadcasters, a drain which accelerates every time someone posts something funny, or poignant, or instructive to YouTube.

The mass media hasn’t collapsed, but it has been hollowed out. The audience occasionally tunes in – especially to watch something newsworthy, in real-time – but they’ve moved on. It’s all about what we’re saying directly to one another. The individual – every individual – has become a broadcaster in his or her own right. The mechanics of this person-to-person sharing, and the architecture of these “New Networks”, are driven by the oldest instincts of humankind.

The New Networks

Human beings are social animals. Long before we became human – or even recognizably close – we became social. For at least 11 million years, before our ancestors broke off from the gorillas and chimpanzees, we cultivated social characteristics. In social groups, these distant forbears could share the tasks of survival: finding food, raising young, and self-defense. Human babies, in particular, take many years to mature, requiring constantly attentive parenting – time stolen away from other vital activities. Living in social groups helped ensure that these defenseless members of the group grew to adulthood. The adults who best expressed social qualities bore more and healthier children. The day-to-day pressures of survival on the African savannahs drove us to be ever more adept with our social skills.

We learned to communicate with gestures, then (no one knows just how long ago) we learned to speak. Each step forward in communication reinforced our social relationships; each moment of conversation reaffirms our commitment to one another, every spoken word an unspoken promise to support, defend and extend the group. As we communicate, whether in gestures or in words, we build models of one another’s behavior. (This is why we can judge a friend’s reaction to some bit of news, or a joke, long before it comes out of our mouths.) We have always walked around with our heads full of other people, a tidy little “social network,” the first and original human network. We can hold about 150 other people in our heads (chimpanzees can manage about 30, gorillas about 15, but we’ve got extra brains they don’t to help us with that), so, for 90% of human history, we lived in tribes of no more than about 150 individuals, each of us in constant contact, a consistent communication building and reinforcing bonds which would make us the most successful animals on Earth. We learned from one another, and shared whatever we learned; a continuity of knowledge passed down seamlessly, generation upon generation, a chain of transmission that still survives within the world’s indigenous communities. Social networks are the gentle strings which connect us to our origins.

This is the old network. But it’s also the new network. A few years ago, researcher Mizuko Ito studied teenagers in Japan, to find that these kids – all of whom owned mobile telephones – sent as many as a few hundred text messages, every single day, to the same small circle of friends. These messages could be intensely meaningful (the trials and tribulations of adolescent relationships), or just pure silliness; the content mattered much less than that constant reminder and reinforcement of the relationship. This “co-presence,” as she named it, represents the modern version of an incredibly ancient human behavior, a behavior that had been unshackled by technology, to span vast distances. These teens could send a message next door, or halfway across the country. Distance mattered not: the connection was all.

In 2001, when Ito published her work, many dismissed her findings as a by-product of those “wacky Japanese” and their technophile lust for new toys. But now, teenagers everywhere in the developed world do the same thing, sending tens to hundreds of text messages a day. When they run out of money to send texts (which they do, unless they have very wealthy parents), they simply move online, using instant messaging and MySpace and other techniques to continue the never-ending conversation.

We adults do it too, though we don’t recognize it. Most of us who live some of our lives online, receive a daily dose of email: we flush the spam, answer the requests and queries of our co-workers, deal with any family complaints. What’s left over, from our friends, more and more consists of nothing other than a link to something – a video, a website, a joke – somewhere on the Internet. This new behavior, actually as old as we are, dates from the time when sharing information ensured our survival. Each time we find something that piques our interest, we immediately think, “hmm, I bet so-and-so would really like this.” That’s the social network in our heads, grinding away, filtering our experience against our sense of our friends’ interests. We then hit the “forward” button, sending the tidbit along, reinforcing that relationship, reminding them that we’re still here – and still care. These “Three Fs” – find, filter and forward – have become the cornerstone of our new networks, information flowing freely from person-to-person, in weird and unpredictable ways, unbounded by geography or simultaneity (a friend can read an email weeks after you send it), but always according to long-established human behaviors.

One thing is different about the new networks: we are no longer bounded by the number of individuals we can hold in our heads. Although we’ll never know more than 150 people well enough for them to take up some space between our ears (unless we grow huge, Spock-like minds) our new tools allow us to reach out and connect with casual acquaintances, or even people we don’t know. Our connectivity has grown into “hyperconnectivity”, and a single individual, with the right message, at the right time, can reach millions, almost instantaneously.

This simple, sudden, subtle change in culture has changed everything.

The Nuclear Option

On the 12th of May in 2008, a severe earthquake shook a vast area of southeast Asia, centered in the Chinese state of Sichuan. Once the shaking stopped – in some places, it lasted as long as three minutes – people got up (when they could, as may lay under collapsed buildings), dusted themselves off, and surveyed the damage. Those who still had power turned to their computers to find out what had happened, and share what had happened to them. Some of these people used so-called “social messaging services”, which allowed them to share a short message – similar to a text message – with hundreds or thousands of acquaintances in their hyperconnected social networks.

Within a few minutes, people on every corner of the planet knew about the earthquake – well in advance of any reports from Associated Press, the BBC, or CNN. This network of individuals, sharing information each other through their densely hyperconnected networks, spread the news faster, more effectively, and more comprehensively than any global broadcaster.

This had happened before. On 7 July 2005, the first pictures of the wreckage caused by bombs detonated within London’s subway system found their way onto Flickr, an Internet photo-sharing service, long before being broadcast by BBC. A survivor, waking past one of the destroyed subway cars, took snaps from her mobile and sent them directly on to Flickr, where everyone on the planet could have a peek. One person can reach everyone else, if what they have to say (or show) merits such attention, because that message, even if seen by only one other person, will be forwarded on and on, through our hyperconnected networks, until it has been received by everyone for whom that message has salience. Just a few years ago, it might have taken hours (or even days) for a message to traverse the Human Network. Now it happens a few seconds.

Most messages don’t have a global reach, nor do they need one. It is enough that messages reach interested parties, transmitted via the Human Network, because just that alone has rewritten the rules of culture. An intemperate CEO screams at a consultant, who shares the story through his network: suddenly, no one wants to work for the CEO’s firm. A well-connected blogger gripes about problems with his cable TV provider, a story forwarded along until – just a half-hour later – he receives a call from a vice-president of that company, contrite with apologies and promises of an immediate repair. An American college student, arrested in Egypt for snapping some photos in the wrong place at the wrong time, text messages a single word – “ARRESTED” – to his social network, and 24 hours later, finds himself free, escorted from jail by a lawyer and the American consul, because his network forwarded this news along to those who could do something about his imprisonment.

Each of us, thoroughly hyperconnected, brings the eyes and ears of all of humanity with us, wherever we go. Nothing is hidden anymore, no secret safe. We each possess a ‘nuclear option’ – the capability to go wide, instantaneously, bringing the hyperconnected attention of the Human Network to a single point. This dramatically empowers each of us, a situation we are not at all prepared for. A single text message, forwarded perhaps a million times, organized the population of Xiamen, a coastal city in southern China, against a proposed chemical plant – despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to sensor the message as it passed through the state-run mobile telephone network. Another message, forwarded around a community of white supremacists in Sydney’s southern suburbs, led directly to the Cronulla Riots, two days of rampage and attacks against Sydney’s Lebanese community, in December 2005.

When we watch or read stories about the technologies of sharing, they almost always center on recording companies and film studios crying poverty, of billions of dollars lost to ‘piracy’. That’s a sideshow, a distraction. The media companies have been hurt by the Human Network, but that’s only a minor a side-effect of the huge cultural transformation underway. As we plug into the Human Network, and begin to share that which is important to us with others who will deem it significant, as we learn to “find the others”, reinforcing the bonds to those others every time we forward something to them, we dissolve the monolithic ties of mass media and mass culture. Broadcasters, who spoke to millions, are replaced by the Human Network: each of us, networks in our own right, conversing with a few hundred well-chosen others. The cultural consensus, driven by the mass media, which bound 20th-century nations together in a collective vision, collapses into a Babel-like configuration of social networks which know no cultural or political boundaries.

The bomb has already dropped. The nuclear option has been exercised. The Human Network brought us together, and broke us apart. But in these fragments and shards of culture we find an immense vitality, the protean shape of the civilization rising to replace the world we have always known. It all hinges on the transition from sharing to knowing.

One of the things I find the most exhilarating about Australia is the relative shallowness of its social networks. Where we’re accustomed to hearing about the “six degrees of separation” which connect any two individuals on Earth, in Australia we live with social networks which are, in general, about two levels deep. If I don’t know someone, I know someone who knows that someone.

While this may be slightly less true across the population as a whole (I may not know a random individual living in Kalgoorlie, and might not know someone who knows them) it is specifically quite true within any particular professional domain. After four years living in Sydney, attending and speaking at conferences throughout the nation, I’ve met most everyone involved in the so-called “new” media, and a great majority of the individuals involved in film and television production.

The most consequential of these connections sit in my address book, my endless trail of email, and my ever-growing list of Facebook friends. These connections evolve into relationships as we bat messages back and forth: emails and text messages, and links to the various interesting tidbits we find, filter and forward to those we imagine will gain the most from this informational hunting & gathering. Each transmission reinforces the bond between us – or, if I’ve badly misjudged you, ruptures that bond. The more we share with each other, the stronger the bond becomes. It becomes a covert network; invisible to the casual observer, but resilient and increasingly important to each of us. This is the network that carries gossip – Australians are great gossipers – as well as insights, opportunities, and news of the most personal sort.

In a small country, even one as geographically dispersed as Australia, this means that news travels fast. This is interesting to watch, and terrifying to participate in, because someone’s outrageous behavior is shared very quickly through these networks. Consider Roy Greenslade’s comments about Andrew Jaspan, at Friday’s “Future of Journalism” conference, which made their way throughout the nation in just a few minutes, via “live” blogs and texts, getting star billing in Friday’s Crikey. While Greenslade damned Jaspan, I was trapped in studio 21 at ABC Ultimo, shooting The New Inventors, yet I found out about his comments almost the moment I walked off set. Indeed, connected as I am to individuals such as Margaret Simmons and Rosanne Bersten (both of whom were at the conference) it would have been more surprising if I hadn’t learned about it.

All of this means that we Australians are under tremendous pressure to play nice – at least in public. Bad behavior (or, in this case, a terrifyingly honest assessment of a colleague’s qualifications) so excites the network of connections that it propagates immediately. And, within our tight little professional social networks, we’re so well connected that it propagates ubiquitously. Everyone to whom Greenslade’s comments were salient heard about them within a few minutes after he uttered them. There was a perfect meeting between the message and its intended audience.

That is a new thing.

II.

Over the past few months, I have grown increasingly enamoured with one of the newest of the “Web2.0” toys, a site known as “Twitter”. Twitter originally billed itself as a “micro-blogging” site: you can post messages (“tweets”, in Twitter parlance) of no more than 140 characters to Twitter, and these tweets are distributed to a list of “followers”. Conversely, you are sent the tweets created by all of the individuals whom you “follow”. One of the beauties of Twitter is that it is multi-modal; you can send a tweet via text message, through a web page, or from an ever-growing range of third-party applications. Twitter makes it very easy for a bright young programmer to access Twitter’s servers – which means people are now doing all sorts of interesting things with Twitter.

At the moment, Twitter is still in the domain of the early-adopters. Worldwide, there are only about a million Twitter users, with about 200,000 active in any week – and these folks are sending an average of three million tweets a day. That may not sound like many people, but these 200,000 “Twitteratti” are among the thought-leaders in new media. Their influence is disproportionate. They may not include the CIOs of the largest institutions in the world, but they do include the folks whom those CIOs turn to for advice. And whom do these thought-leaders turn to for advice? Twitter.

A simple example: When I sat down to write this, I had no idea how many Twitter users there are at present, so I posted the following tweet:

Question: Does anyone know how many Twitter users (roughly) there are at present? Thanks!

Within a few minutes, Stilgherrian (who writes for Crikey) responded with the following:

There are 1M+ Twitter users, with 200,000 active in any week.

Stilgherrian also passed along a link to his blog where he discusses Twitter’s statistics, and muses upon his increasing reliance on the service.

Before I asked the Twitteratti my question, I did the logical thing: I searched Google. But Google didn’t have any reasonably recent results – the most recent dated from about a year ago. No love from Google. Instead, I turned to my 250-or-so Twitter followers, and asked them. Given my own connectedness in the new media community in Australia, I have, through Twitter, access to an enormous reservoir of expertise. If I don’t know the answer to a question – and I can’t find an answer online – I do know someone, somewhere, who has an answer.

Twitter, gossipy, noisy, inane and frequently meaningless, acts as my 21st-century brain trust. With Twitter I have immediate access to a broad range of very intelligent people, whose interests and capabilities overlap mine enough that we can have an interesting conversation, but not so completely that we have nothing to share with one another. Twitter extends my native capability by giving me a high degree of continuous connectivity with individuals who complement those capabilities.

That’s a new thing, too.

William Gibson, the science fiction author and keen social observer, once wrote, “The street finds its own use for things, uses the manufacturers never intended.” The true test of the value of any technology is, “Does the street care?” In the case of Twitter, the answer is a resounding “Yes!”. This personal capacity enhancement – or, as I phrase it, “hyperempowerment” – is not at all what Twitter was designed to do. It was designed to facilitate the posting of short, factual messages. The harvesting of the expertise of my oh-so-expert social network is a behavior that grew out of my continued interactions with Twitter. It wasn’t planned for, either by Twitter’s creators, or by me. It just happened. And not every Twitter user puts Twitter to this use. But some people, who see what I’m doing, will copy my behavior (which probably didn’t originate with me, though I experienced a penny-drop moment when I realized I could harvest expertise from my social network using Twitter), because it is successful. This behavior will quickly replicate, until it’s a bog-standard expectation of all Twitter users.

III.

On Monday morning, before I sat down to write, I checked the morning’s email. Several had come in from individuals in the US, including one from my friend GregoryP, who spent the last week sweating through the creation of a presentation on the value of social media. As many of you know, companies often hire outside consultants, like GregoryP, when the boss needs to hear something that his or her underlings are too afraid say themselves. Such was the situation that GregoryP walked into, with sadly familiar results. From his blog:

As for that “secret” company – it seems fairly certain to me that I won’t be working for any dot-com pure plays in the near future. As I touched on in my Twitter account, my presentation went well but the response to it was something more than awful. As far as I could tell, the generally-absent Director of the Company wasn’t briefed on who I was or why I was there, exactly – she took the opportunity to impugn my credibility and credentials and more or less acted as if I’d tried to rip her company off.

I immediately read GregoryP’s Twitter stream, to find that he had been used, abused and insulted by the MD in question.

Which was a big, big mistake.

GregoryP is not very well connected on Twitter. He’s only just started using it. A fun little website, TweetWheel, shows all nine of his connections. But two of his connections – to Raven Zachary and myself – open into a much, much wider world of Twitteratti. Raven has over 600 people following his tweets, and I have over 250 followers. Both of us are widely-known, well-connected individuals. Both of us are good friends with GregoryP. And both of us are really upset at bad treatment he received.

Here’s how GregoryP finished off that blog post:

Let’s just say it’ll be a cold day in hell before I offer any help, friendly advice or contacts to these people. I’d be more specific about who they are but I wouldn’t want to give them any more promotion than I already have.

What’s odd here – and a sign that the penny hasn’t really dropped – is that GregoryP doesn’t really understand that “promotion” isn’t so much a beneficial influence as a chilling threat to lay waste to this company’s business prospects. This MD saw GregoryP standing before her, alone and defenseless, bearing a message that she was of no mind to receive, despite the fact that her own staff set this meeting up, for her own edification.

What this unfortunate MD did not see – because she does not “get” social media – was Raven and myself, directly connected to GregoryP. Nor does she see the hundreds of people we connect directly to, nor the tens of thousands connected directly to them. She thought she was throwing her weight around. She was wrong. She was making an ass out of herself, behaving very badly in a world where bad behavior is very, very hard to hide.

All GregoryP need do, to deliver the coup de grace, is reveal the name of the company in question. As word spread – that is, nearly instantaneously – that company would find it increasingly difficult to recruit good technology consultants, programmers, and technology marketers, because we all share our experiences. Sharing our experiences improves our effectiveness, and prevents us from making bad decisions. Such as working with this as-yet-unnamed company.

The MD walked into this meeting believing she held all the cards; in fact, GregoryP is the one with his finger poised over the launch button. With just a word, he could completely ruin her business. This utter transformation in power politics – “hyperconnectivity” leading to hyperempowerment – is another brand new thing. This brand new thing is going to change everything it touches, every institution and every relationship any individual brings to those institutions. Many of those institutions will not survive, because their reputations will not be able to withstand the glare of hyperconnectivity backed by the force of hyperempowerment.

The question before us today is not, “Who is the audience?”, but rather, “Is there anyone who isn’t in the audience?” As you can now see, a single individual – anywhere – is the entire audience. Every single person is now so well-connected that anything which happens to them or in front of them reaches everyone it needs to reach, almost instantaneously.

This newest of new things has only just started to rise up and flex its muscles. The street, ever watchful, will find new uses for it, uses that corporations, governments and institutions of every stripe will find incredibly distasteful, chaotic, and impossible to manage.

In mid-1994, sometime shortly after Tony Parisi and I had fused the new technology of the World Wide Web to a 3D visualization engine, to create VRML, we paid a visit to the University of Santa Cruz, about 120 kilometers south of San Francisco. Two UCSC students wanted to pitch us on their own web media project. The Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA, featured a simple directory of artists, complete with links to MP3 files of these artists’ recordings. (Before I go any further, I should state that they had all the necessary clearances to put musical works up onto the Web – IUMA was not violating anyone’s copyrights.) The idea behind IUMA was simple enough, the technology absolutely straightforward – and yet, for all that, it was utterly revolutionary. Anyone, anywhere could surf over to the IUMA site, pick an artist, then download a track and play it.

This was in the days before broadband, so downloading a multi-megabyte MP3 recording could take upwards of an hour per track – something that seems ridiculous today, but was still so potent back in 1994 that IUMA immediately became one of the most popular sites on the still-quite-tiny Web. The founders of IUMA – Rob Lord and Jon Luini – wanted to create a place where unsigned or non-commercial musicians could share their music with the public in order to reach a larger audience, gain recognition, and perhaps even end up with a recording deal. IUMA was always better as a proof-of-concept than as a business opportunity, but the founders did get venture capital, and tried to make a go of selling music online. However, given the relative obscurity of the musicians on IUMA, and the pre-iPod lack of pervasive MP3 players, IUMA ran through its money by 2001, shuttering during the dot-com implosion of the same year. Despite that, every music site which followed IUMA, legal and otherwise, from Napster to Rhapsody to iTunes, has walked in its footsteps. Now, nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we have a broadband infrastructure capable of delivery MP3s, and several hundred million devices which can play them. IUMA was a good idea, but five years too early.

Just forty-eight hours ago, a new music service, calling itself Qtrax, aborted its international launch – though it promises to be up “real soon now.” Qtrax also promises that anyone, anywhere will be able to download any of its twenty-five million songs perfectly legally, and listen to them practically anywhere they like – along with an inserted advertisement. Using peer-to-peer networking to relieve the burden on its own servers, and Digital Rights Management, or DRM, Qtrax ensures that there are no abuses of these pseudo-free recordings.

Most of the words that I used to describe Qtrax in the preceding paragraph didn’t exist in common usage when IUMA disappeared from the scene in the first year of this millennium. The years between IUMA and Qtrax are a geological age in Internet time, so it’s a good idea to walk back through that era and have a good look at the fossils which speak to how we evolved to where we are today.

In 1999, a curly-haired undergraduate at Boston’s Northeastern University built a piece of software that allowed him to share his MP3 collection with a few of his friends on campus, and allowed him access to their MP3s. This scanned the MP3s on each hard drive, publishing the list to a shared database, allowing each person using the software to download the MP3 from someone else’s hard drive to his own. This is simple enough, technically, but Shawn Fanning’s Napster created a dual-headed revolution. First, it was the killer app for broadband: using Napster on a dial-up connection was essentially impossible. Second, it completely ignored the established systems of distribution used for recorded music.

This second point is the one which has the most relevance to my talk this morning; Napster had an entirely unpredicted effect on the distribution methodologies which had been the bedrock of the recording industry for the past hundred years. The music industry grew up around the licensing, distribution and sale of a physical medium – a piano roll, a wax recording, a vinyl disk, a digital compact disc. However, when the recording industry made the transition to CDs in the 1980s (and reaped windfall profits as the public purchased new copies of older recordings) they also signed their own death warrants. Digital recordings are entirely ephemeral, composed only of mathematics, not of matter. Any system which transmitted the mathematics would suffice for the distribution of music, and the compact disc met this need only until computers were powerful enough to play the more compact MP3 format, and broadband connections were fast enough to allow these smaller files to be transmitted quickly. Napster leveraged both of these criteria – the mathematical nature of digitally-encoded music and the prevalence of broadband connections on America’s college campuses – to produce a sensation.

In its earliest days, Napster reflected the tastes of its college-age users, but, as word got out, the collection of tracks available through Napster grew more varied and more interesting. Many individuals took recordings that were only available on vinyl, and digitally recorded them specifically to post them on Napster. Napster quickly had a more complete selection of recordings than all but the most comprehensive music stores. This only attracted more users to Napster, who added more oddities from their on collections, which attracted more users, and so on, until Napster became seen as the authoritative source for recorded music.

Given that all of this “file-sharing”, as it was termed, happened outside of the economic systems of distribution established by the recording industry, it was taking money out of their pockets – probably something greater than billions of dollars a year was lost, if all of these downloads had been converted into sales. (Studies indicate this was unlikely – college students have ever been poor.) The recording industry launched a massive lawsuit against Napster in 2000, forcing the service to shutter in 2001, just as it reached an incredible peak of 14 million simultaneous users, out of a worldwide broadband population of probably only 100 million. This means that one in seven computers connected to the broadband internet were using Napster just as it was being shut down.

Here’s where it gets more interesting: the recording industry thought they’d brought the horse back into the barn. What they hadn’t realized was that the gate had burnt down. The millions of Napster users had their appetites whet by a world where an incredible variety of music was instantaneously available with few clicks of the mouse. In the absence of Napster, that pressure remained, and it only took a few weeks for a few enterprising engineers to create a successor to Napster, known as Gnutella, which provided the same service as Napster, but used a profoundly different technology for its filesharing. Where Napster had all of its users register their tracks within a centralized database (which disappeared when Napster was shut down) Gnutella created a vast, amorphous, distributed database, spread out across all of the computers running Guntella. Gnutella had no center to strike at, and therefore could not be shut down.

It is because of the actions of the recording industry that Gnutella was developed. If legal pressure hadn’t driven Napster out of business, Gnutella would not have been necessary. The recording industry turned out to be its own worst enemy, because it turned a potentially profitable relationship with its customers into an ever-escalating arms race of file-sharing tools, lawsuits, and public relations nightmares.

Once Gnutella and its descendants – Kazaa, Limewire, and Acquisition – arrived on the scene, the listening public had wholly taken control of the distribution of recorded music. Every attempt to shut down these ever-more-invisible “darknets” has ended in failure and only spurred the continued growth of these networks. Now, with Qtrax, the recording industry is seeking to make an accommodation with an audience which expects music to be both free and freely available, falling back on advertising revenue source to recover some of their production costs.

At first, it seemed that filmic media would be immune from the disruptions that have plagued the recording industry – films and TV shows, even when heavily compressed, are very large files, on the order of hundreds of millions of bytes of data. Systems like Gnutella, which allow you to transfer a file directly from one computer to another are not particularly well-suited to such large file transfers. In 2002, an unemployed programmer named Bram Cohen solved that problem definitively with the introduction of a new file-sharing system known as BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is a bit mysterious to most everyone not deeply involved in technology, so a brief of explanation will help to explain its inner workings. Suppose, for a moment, that I have a short film, just 1000 frames in length, digitally encoded on my hard drive. If I wanted to share this film with each of you via Gnutella, you’d have to wait in a queue as I served up the film, time and time again, to each of you. The last person in the queue would wait quite a long time. But if, instead, I gave the first ten frames of the film to the first person in the queue, and the second ten frames to the second person in the queue, and the third ten frames to the third person in the queue, and so on, until I’d handed out all thousand frames, all I need do at that point is tell each of you that each of your “peers” has the missing frames, and that you needed to get them from those peers. A flurry of transfers would result, as each peer picked up the pieces it needed to make a complete whole from other peers. From my point of view, I only had to transmit the film once – something I can do relatively quickly. From your point of view, none of you had to queue to get the film – because the pieces were scattered widely around, in little puzzle pieces, that you could gather together on your own.

That’s how BitTorrent works. It is both incredibly efficient and incredibly resilient – peers can come and go as they please, yet the total number of peers guaratees that somewhere out there is an entire copy of the film available at all times. And, even more perversely, the more people who want copies of my film, the easier it is for each successive person to get a copy of the film – because there are more peers to grab pieces from. This group of peers, known as a “swarm”, is the most efficient system yet developed for the distribution of digital media. In fact, a single, underpowered computer, on a single, underpowered broadband link can, via BitTorrent, create a swarm of peers. BitTorrent allows anyone, anywhere, distribute any large media file at essentially no cost.

It is estimated that upwards of 60% of all traffic on the Internet is composed of BitTorrent transfers. Much of this traffic is perfectly legitimate – software, such as the free Linux operating system, is distributed using BitTorrent. Still, it is well known that movies and television programmes are also distributed using BitTorrent, in violation of copyright. This became absolutely clear on the 14th of October 2004, when Sky Broadcasting in the UK premiered the first episode of Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore’s dark re-imagining of the famous shlocky 1970s TV series. Because the American distributor, SciFi Channel, had chosen to hold off until January to broadcast the series, fans in the UK recorded the programmes and posted them to BitTorrent for American fans to download. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the episodes circulated in the United States – and conventional thinking would reckon that this would seriously impact the ratings of the show upon its US premiere. In fact, precisely the opposite happened: the show was so well written and produced that the word-of-mouth engendered by all this mass piracy created an enormous broadcast audience for the series, making it the most successful in SciFi Channel history.

In the age of BitTorrent, piracy is not necessarily a menace. The ability to “hyperdistribute” a programme – using BitTorrent to send a single copy of a programme to millions of people around the world efficiently and instantaneously – creates an environment where the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. This seems counterintuitive, but only in the context of systems of distribution which were part-and-parcel of the scarce exhibition outlets of theaters and broadcasters. Once everyone, everywhere had the capability to “tuning into” a BitTorrent broadcast, the economics of distribution were turned on their heads. The distribution gatekeepers, stripped of their power, whinge about piracy. But, as was the case with recorded music, the audience has simply asserted its control over distribution. This is not about piracy. This is about the audience getting whatever it wants, by any means necessary. They have the tools, they have the intent, and they have the power of numbers. It is foolishness to insist that the future will be substantially different from the world we see today. We can not change the behavior of the audience. Instead, we must all adapt to things as they are.

But things as the are have changed more than you might know. This is not the story of how piracy destroyed the film industry. This is the story how the audience became not just the distributors but the producers of their own content, and, in so doing, brought down the high walls which separate professionals from amateurs.

II. The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls

Without any doubt the most outstanding success of the second phase of the Web (known colloquially as “Web 2.0”) is the video-sharing site YouTube. Founded in early 2005, as of yesterday YouTube was the third most visited site on the entire Web, led only by Yahoo! and YouTube’s parent, Google. There are a lot of videos on YouTube. I’m not sure if anyone knows quite how many, but they easily number in the tens of millions, quite likely approaching a hundred million. Another hundred thousand videos are uploaded each day; YouTube grows by three million videos a month. That’s a lot of video, difficult even to contemplate. But an understanding of YouTube is essential for anyone in the film and television industries in the 21st century, because, in the most pure, absolute sense, YouTube is your competitor.

Let me unroll that statement a bit, because I don’t wish it to be taken as simply as it sounds. It’s not that YouTube is competing with you for dollars – it isn’t, at least not yet – but rather, it is competing for attention. Attention is the limiting factor for the audience; we are cashed up but time-poor. Yet, even as we’ve become so time-poor, the number of options for how we can spend that time entertaining ourselves has grown so grotesquely large as to be almost unfathomable. This is the real lesson of YouTube, the one I want you to consider in your deliberations today. In just the past three years we have gone from an essential scarcity of filmic media – presented through limited and highly regulated distribution channels – to a hyperabundance of viewing options.

This hyperabundance of choices, it was supposed until recently, would lead to a sort of “decision paralysis,” whereby the viewer would be so overwhelmed by the number of choices on offer that they would simply run back, terrified, to the highly regularized offerings of the old-school distribution channels. This has not happened; in fact, the opposite has occured: the audience is fragmenting, breaking up into ever-smaller “microaudiences”. It is these microaudiences that YouTube speaks directly to. The language of microaudiences is YouTube’s native tongue.

In order to illustrate the transformation that has completely overtaken us, let’s consider a hypothetical fifteen year-old boy, home after a day at school. He is multi-tasking: texting his friends, posting messages on Bebo, chatting away on IM, surfing the web, doing a bit of homework, and probably taking in some entertainment. That might be coming from a television, somewhere in the background, or it might be coming from the Web browser right in front of him. (Actually, it’s probably both simultaneously.) This teenager has a limited suite of selections available on the telly – even with satellite or cable, there won’t be more than a few hundred choices on offer, and he’s probably settled for something that, while not incredibly satisfying, is good enough to play in the background.

Meanwhile, on his laptop, he’s viewing a whole series of YouTube videos that he’s received from his friends; they’ve found these videos in their own wanderings, and immediately forwarded them along, knowing that he’ll enjoy them. He views them, and laughs, he forwards them along to other friends, who will laugh, and forward them along to other friends, and so on. Sharing is an essential quality of all of the media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it can’t be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it can’t be forwarded along, it’s broken.

For this fifteen year-old, the concept of a broadcast network no longer exists. Television programmes might be watched as they’re broadcast over the airwaves, but more likely they’re spooled off of a digital video recorder, or downloaded from the torrent and watched where and when he chooses. The broadcast network has been replaced by the social network of his friends, all of whom are constantly sharing the newest, coolest things with one another. The current hot item might be something that was created at great expense for a mass audience, but the relationship between a hot piece of media and its meaningfulness for a microaudience is purely coincidental. All the marketing dollars in the world can foster some brand awareness, but no amount of money will inspire that fifteen year old to forward something along – because his social standing hangs in the balance. If he passes along something lame, he’ll lose social standing with his peers. This factors into every decision he makes, from the brand of runners he wears, to the television series he chooses to watch. Because of the hyperabundance of media – something he takes as a given, not as an incredibly recent development – all of his media decisions are weighed against the values and tastes of his social network, rather than against a scarcity of choices.

This means that the true value of media in the 21st century is entirely personal, and based upon the salience, that is, the importance, of that media to the individual and that individual’s social network. The mass market, with its enforced scarcity, simply does not enter into his calculations. Yes, he might go to the theatre to see Transformers with his mates; but he’s just as likely to download a copy recorded in the movie theatre with an illegally smuggled-in camera that was uploaded to The Pirate Bay a few hours after its release.

That’s today. Now let’s project ourselves five years into the future. YouTube is still around, but now it has more than two hundred million videos (probably much more), all available, all the time, from short-form to full-length features, many of which are now available in high-definition. There’s so much “there” there that it is inconceivable that conventional media distribution mechanisms of exhibition and broadcast could compete. For this twenty year-old, every decision to spend some of his increasingly-valuable attention watching anything is measured against salience: “How important is this for me, right now?” When he weighs the latest episode of a TV series against some newly-made video that is meant only to appeal to a few thousand people – such as himself – that video will win, every time. It more completely satisfies him. As the number of videos on offer through YouTube and its competitors continues to grow, the number of salient choices grows ever larger. His social network, communicating now through FaceBook and MySpace and next-generation mobile handsets and iPods and goodness-knows-what-else is constantly delivering an ever-growing and increasingly-relevant suite of media options. He, as a vital node within his social network, is doing his best to give as good as he gets. His reputation depends on being “on the tip.”

When the barriers to media distribution collapsed in the post-Napster era, the exhibitors and broadcasters lost control of distribution. What no one had expected was that the professional producers would lose control of production. The difference between an amateur and a professional – in the media industries – has always centered on the point that the professional sells their work into distribution, while the amateur uses wits and will to self-distribute. Now that self-distribution is more effective than professional distribution, how do we distinguish between the professional and the amateur? This twenty year-old doesn’t know, and doesn’t care.

There is no conceivable way that the current systems of film and television production and distribution can survive in this environment. This is an uncomfortable truth, but it is the only truth on offer this morning. I’ve come to this conclusion slowly, because it seems to spell the death of a hundred year-old industry with many, many creative professionals. In this environment, television is already rediscovering its roots as a live medium, increasingly focusing on news, sport and “event” based programming, such as Pop Idol, where being there live is the essence of the experience. Broadcasting is uniquely designed to support the efficient distribution of live programming. Hollywood will continue to churn out blockbuster after blockbuster, seeking a warmed-over middle ground of thrills and chills which ensures that global receipts will cover the ever-increasing production costs. In this form, both industries will continue for some years to come, and will probably continue to generate nice profits. But the audience’s attentions have turned elsewhere. They’re not returning.

This future almost completely excludes “independent” production, a vague term which basically means any production which takes place outside of the media megacorporations (News Corp, Disney, Sony, Universal and TimeWarner), which increasingly dominate the mass media landscape. Outside of their corporate embrace, finding an audience sufficient to cover production and marketing costs has become increasingly difficult. Film and television have long been losing economic propositions (except for the most lucky), but they’re now becoming financially suicidal. National and regional funding bodies are growing increasingly intolerant of funding productions which can not find an audience; soon enough that pipeline will be cut off, despite the damage to national cultures. Australia funds the Film Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Council to the tune of a hundred million dollars a year, to ensure that Australian stories are told by Australian voices; but Australians don’t go to see them in the theatres, and don’t buy them on DVD.

The center can not hold. Instead, YouTube, which founder Steve Chen insists has “no gold standard” of production values, is rapidly becoming the vehicle for independent productions; productions which cost not millions of euros, but hundreds, and which make up for their low production values in salience and in overwhelming numbers. This tsunami of content can not be stopped or even slowed down; it has nothing to do with piracy (only nine percent of the videos viewed on YouTube are violations of copyright) but reflects the natural accommodation of the audience to an era of media hyperabundance.

What then, is to be done?

III. And The Penny Drops

It isn’t all bad news. But, like a good doctor, I want to give you the bad news right up front: There is no single, long-term solution for film or television production. No panacea. It’s not even entirely clear that the massive Hollywood studios will do business-as-usual for any length of time into the future. Just a decade ago the entire music recording industry seemed impregnable. Now it lies in ruins. To assume that history won’t repeat itself is more than willful ignorance of the facts; it’s bad business.

This means that the one-size-fits-all production-to-distribution model, which all of you have been taught as the orthodoxy of the media industries, is worse than useless; it’s actually blocking your progress because it is effectively keeping you from thinking outside the square. This is a wholly new world, one which is littered with golden opportunities for those able to avail themselves of them. We need to get you from where you are – bound to an obsolete production model – to where you need to be. Let me illustrate this transition with two examples.

In early 2005, producer Ronda Byrne got a production agreement with Channel NINE, then the number one Australian television network, to make a feature-length television programme about the “law of attraction”, an idea she’d learned of when reading a book published in 1910, The Science of Getting Rich. The interviews and other footage were shot in July and August, and after a few months in the editing suite, she showed the finished production to executives at Channel NINE, who declined to broadcast it, believing it lacked mass appeal. Since Byrne wasn’t going to be getting broadcast fees from Channel NINE to cover her production costs, she negotiated a new deal with NINE, allowing her to sell DVDs of the completed film.

At this point Byrne began spreading news of the film virally, through the communities she thought would be most interested in viewing it; specifically, spiritual and “New Age” communities. People excited by Byrne’s teaser marketing could pay $20 for a DVD copy of the film (with extended features), or pay $5 to watch a streaming version directly on their computer. As the film made its way to its intended audience, word-of-mouth caused business to mushroom overnight. The Secret became a blockbuster, selling millions of copies on DVD. A companion book, also titled The Secret, has sold over two million copies. And that arbiter of American popular taste, Oprah, has featured the film and book on her talk show, praising both to the skies. The film has earned back many, many times its production costs, making Byrne a wealthy woman. She’s already deep into the production of a sequel to The Secret – a film which already has an audience identified and targeted.

Chagrined, the television executives of Channel NINE finally did broadcast The Secret in February 2007. It didn’t do that well. This sums up the paradox distribution in the age of the microaudience. Clearly The Secret had a massive world-wide audience, but television wasn’t the most effective way to reach them, because this audience was actually a collection of microaudiences, rather than a single, aggregated audience. If The Secret had opened theatrically, it’s unlikely it would have done terribly well; it’s the kind of film that people want to watch more than once, being in equal parts a self-help handbook and a series of inspirational stories. It is well-suited for a direct-to-DVD release – a distribution vehicle that no longer has the stigma of “failure” associated with it. It is also well-suited to cross-media projects, such as books, conferences, streamed delivery, podcasts, and so forth. Having found her audience, Byrne has transformed The Secret into an exceptional money-making franchise, as lucrative, in its own way, and at its own scale, as any Hollywood franchise.

The second example is utterly different from The Secret, yet the fundamentals are strikingly similar. Just last month a production group calling themselves “The League of Peers” released a film titled Steal This Film, Part 2. The first part of this film, released in late 2006, dealt with the rise of file-sharing, and, in specific, with the legal troubles of the world’s largest BitTorrent site, Sweden’s The Pirate Bay. That film, although earnest and coherent, felt as though it was produced by individuals still learning the craft of filmmaking. This latest film feels looks as professional as any documentary created for BBC’s Horizon or PBS’s Frontline or ABC’s 4Corners. It is slick, well-lit, well-edited, and has a very compelling story to tell about the history of copying – beginning with the invention of the printing press, five hundred years ago. Steal This Film is a political production, a bit of propaganda with an bias. This, in itself, is not uncommon in a documentary. The funding and distribution model for this film is what makes it relatively unique.

Individuals who saw Steal This Film, Part One – which was made freely available for download via BitTorrent – were invited to contribute to the making of the sequel. Nearly five million people downloaded Steal This Film, Part One, so there was a substantial base of contributors to draw from. (I myself donated five dollars after viewing the film. If every viewer had done likewise that would cover the budget of a major Hollywood production!) The League of Peers also approached arts funding bodies, such as the British Documentary Council, with their completed film in hand, the statistics showing that their work reached a large audience, and a roadmap for the second film – this got them additional funding. Now, having released Steal This Film, Part Two, viewers are again invited to contribute (if they like the film), promised a “secret gift” for contributions of $15 or more. While the tip jar – literally, busking – may seem a very weird way to fund a film production, it’s likely that Steal This Film, Part Two will find an even wider audience than Part One, and that the coffers of the League of Peers will provide them with enough funds to embark on their next film, The Oil of the 21st Century, which will focus on the evolution of intellectual property into a traded commodity.

I have asked Screen Training Ireland to include a DVD of Steal This Film, Part Two with the materials you received this morning. You’ve been given the DVD version of the film, but I encourage you to download the other versions of the film: the XVID version, for playback on a PC; the iPod version, for portable devices; and the high-definition version, for your visual enjoyment. It’s proof positive that a viable economic model exists for film, even when it is given away. It will not work for all productions, but there is a global community of individuals who are intensely interested in factual works about copyright and intellectual property in the 21st century, who find these works salient, and who are underserved by the media megacorporations, who would not consider it in their own economic best interest to produce or distribute such works. The League of Peers, as part of the community whom this film is intended for, knew how to get the word out about the film (particularly through Boing Boing, the most popular blog in the world, with two million readers a week), and, within a few weeks, nearly everyone who should have heard of the film had heard about it – through their social networks.

Both The Secret and Steal This Film, Part Two are factual works, and it’s clear that this emerging distribution model – which relies on targeting communities of interest – works best with factual productions. One of the reasons that there has been such an upsurge in the production of factual works over the past few years is because these works have been able to build their own funding models upon a deep knowledge of the communities they are talking to – made by microaudiences, for microaudiences. But microaudiences, scaled to global proportions, can easily number in the millions. Microaudiences are perfectly willing to pay for something or contribute to something they consider of particular value and salience; it is a visible thank you, a form of social reinforcement which is very natural within social networks.

What about drama, comedy and animation? Short-form comedy and animation probably have the easiest go of it, because they can be delivered online with an advertising payload of some sort. Happy Tree Friends is a great example of how this works – but it took producers Mondo Media nearly a decade to stumble into a successful economic model. Feature-length comedy and feature-length drama are more difficult nuts to crack, but they are not impossible. Again, the key is to find the communities which will be most interested in the production; this is not always entirely obvious, but the filmmaker should have some idea of the target audience for their film. While in preproduction, these communities need to be wooed and seduced into believing that this film is meant just for them, that it is salient. Productions can be released through complementary distribution channels: a limited, occasional run in rented exhibition spaces (which can be “events”, created to promote and showcase the film); direct DVD sales (which are highly lucrative if the producer does this directly); online distribution vehicles such as iTunes Movie Store; and through “community” viewing, where a DVD is given to a few key members of the community in the hopes that word-of-mouth will spread in that community, generating further DVD sales.

None of this guarantees success, but it is the way things work for independent productions in the 21st-century. All of this is new territory. It isn’t a role that belongs neatly to the producer of the film, nor, in the absence of studio muscle, is it something that a film distributor would be competent at. This may not be the producer’s job. But it is someone’s job. Someone must do it. Starting at the earliest stages of pre-production, someone has to sit down with the creatives and the producer and ask the hard questions: “Who is this film intended for?” “What audiences will want to see this film – or see it more than once?” “How do we reach these audiences?” From these first questions, it should be possible to construct a marketing campaign which leverages microaudiences and social networks into ticket receipts and DVD sales and online purchases.

So, as you sit down to do your planning today, and discuss how to move Irish screen industries into the 21st century, ask yourselves who will be fulfilling this role. The producer is already overloaded, time-poor, and may not be particularly good at marketing. The director has a vision, but might be practically autistic when it comes to working with communities. This is a new role, one that is utterly vital to the success of the production, but one which is not yet budgeted for, and one which we do not yet train people to fill. Individuals have succeeded in this new model through their own tireless efforts, but each of these have been scattershot; there is a way to systematize this. While every production and every marketing plan will be unique – drawn from the fundamentals of the story being told – there are commonalities across productions which people will be able to absorb and apply, production after production.

One of my favorite quotes from science fiction writer William Gibson goes, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” This is so obviously true for film and television production that I need only close by noting that there are a lot of success stories out there, individuals who have taken the new laws of hyperdistribution and sharing and turned them to their own advantage. It is a challenge, and there will be failures; but we learn more from our failures than from our successes. Media production has always been a gamble; but the audiences of the 21st century make success easier to achieve than ever before.

For the past few thousand years, life in the southern Indian state of Kerala has followed the natural flow of tides and seasons. The coast, facing out into the Indian Ocean, is dotted with small ports crowded with ancient, tried-and-true sailing craft, known as dhows. Originally piloted by Arabian traders, the dhow has become the workhorse of the Kerala fishermen, who, when winds and tides comply, sail out into the Ocean, drop their nets, and reap a bountiful harvest of fish. Their boats full, they set sail back to shore, to the fish markets that adjoin the ports of Kerala. The fisherman have their choice of ports and markets; nothing compels them to go to a particular market to sell their fish. They might remember that their fish fetched a good price at a particular market last week, and decide to return to that port – only to find that half a dozen other dhows had the same idea. Now the market is flooded with fish. The fisherman must sell their catch – at almost any price – lest it spoil. So it’s a good day for buyers, but the fisherman won’t cover their expenses. Meanwhile, just a few miles down the coast, there’s a market which has been abandoned by the fleet – perhaps too many dhows showed up there last week – and there’s no fish to be had, at any price. If a dhow pulled into that port, their catch would fetch a pretty price. But none does, so the market and buyers are frustrated. It’s been this way along the Kerala coast for thousands of years, the imperfect meeting of sellers and buyers in markets are all too often oversupplied or undersupplied.

Just a few years ago, some of India’s many telecoms companies blanketed the Kerala coast with GSM mobile service. Nothing particularly unusual in that – India is right behind China as the fastest-growing market for wireless telephony. In the entirely deregulated Indian market, price competition is fierce; call rates average just a penny or two for an SMS, and just a few cents a minute for voice calls. That seems incredibly inexpensive to us – but when you factor in the poverty of most Indians, it’s actually a fairly substantial economic barrier. Nonetheless, the allure of instantaneous and pervasive wireless communication seduced at least one of the Kerala fishermen – probably one of the more successful ones – and a handset made its way onto a dhow. (The GSM signal can reach as far as 25 km offshore.) And, when that handset made its way onto that dhow, something unexpected – yet perfectly predictable – happened. That fisherman made a call into shore. That first call might have been entirely innocuous; perhaps calling a relative, or a friend. And perhaps, during the course of that conversation, the fisherman learned that the market nearest the recipient of that call had no fish that day. So that fisherman set for that port, and made a good bounty on his catch.

Kerala is a fine example of the self-organizing human behaviors that emerge naturally when human beings are connected into far-flung networks, but it is far from the only one. Farmers in Kenya phone ahead to learn which markets are offering the best prices for onions and maize. Spice traders – again in Kerala – send texts back and forth as they bargain and trade their wares. This is all wholly new – and yet these are simply basic human cultural behaviors that have simply been amplified by the omnipresent network.

Here in the Western world, we simply accepted the fact that as mobiles became more widespread, some of the friction of social intercourse disappeared. No one, in a well-networked world, is truly late for an appointment, a meeting, or a date. We can be delayed, yes, but we can also deliver moment-to-moment updates of our progress. We made that transition gently, gradually, but are now so bound to the incorporated environment of the network that we do allow ourselves a flourish of anger when someone who should have called doesn’t. That’s rude behavior in the 21st century – the network has changed our expectations for how we should interact in polite society.

If I’d made such a statement a few months ago – and I did, at a conference at UTS – I would expect a strong reaction about the privileged position from which I made this assessment, and how it fed into certain very Western-centric assumptions about productivity and culture. Well, folks, that argument is bullshit. It relies on a culturally-constrained definition of the capabilities of the impoverished, and only tends to keep them impoverished. A poor person with a mobile handset usually becomes less poor – moving up a step or two on the income ladder. In fact, quite a number of the microfinance loans made in Bangladesh and India and Africa pay for the initial purchase of a mobile handset – the first step to improving an individual’s economic effectiveness in the 21st century, irrespective of income level, or nationality, or sex, or culture. This fact is already abundantly clear to the two-thirds of humanity who are nowhere near as rich as those of us in the West. Hence the drive to connect, to become part of the network. It isn’t being driven by marketing, or mobile carriers, or governments. It is a migration of the mass of humanity, onto the network, driven by individual economic interests. It is interesting to note that the same year that saw the majority of humanity living in urban areas will also see the majority of humanity connected into the network; these seemingly-separate phenomena are actually two sides of the same process. We are drawing together, in the perfectly connected hyperspace of the network, and into our ever-more-sprawling urban environments.

While economics provides a frame to understand the unpredictable quality of self-organization that goes hand-in-hand with the network, it is not necessarily the most significant emergent behavior of individuals broadly connected together. When people change the way they communicate, they must necessarily all facets of culture. Some of these transformations are decidedly more problematic.

II: This A Private Fight, Or Can Anyone Join In?

“The second police defense line has been dispersed. There is pushing and shoving. The police wall has broken down.”

That reads as though it might be the live broadcast from a reporter covering some sort of riot – or political agitation. Is this a BBC reporter? Someone from CNN or Reuters?

Or just someone standing in the crowd?

This live coverage was, in fact, a text message, sent by Wen Yunchow, a resident of the Chinese city of Xiamen, to a friend of his, hundreds of miles away, in Guangzhow. Xiamen has been a troubled city for the last several months – starting with an announcement by the local council to construct a gigantic plastics factory in Haicang, which sits just across a narrow straight from downtown Xiamen. While the Chinese are rapidly industrializing, city-dwelling, middle-class Chinese are also becoming increasingly aware of the environmental deterioration which has accompanied industrialization. They’ve seen rivers polluted with industrial effluent and sewage, coastal beaches with great heaps of trash washed on shore, and farmland, expropriated from peasants, turned into luxury homes.

China, like Great Britain in the 19th century, has become an industrialist’s playground. In the UK that led to marches and strikes and the beginnings of the labor movement. But in China, unions are banned, and the state isn’t exactly directly accountable to the people. All over China there are tens of thousands of low-level incidents of protest every year – and some of these turn violent. In the absence of a mechanism to vent the political heat generated by this rush of progress, the energy just builds up until it boils over.

China is industrializing in the 19th-century mode – with big factories. But it is also industrializing in the 21st-century mode – with pervasive wireless networks. China is the world’s largest market for wireless communications – growing faster than India – and it’s a mark of one’s emergence into the middle class to be able to afford at least one mobile. (Many Chinese own more than one handset, and buy a new handset every eight months – far more often than in the West.) China Mobile – the world’s largest mobile carrier, with over three hundred million subscribers – provides wireless services to Xiamen. Over the past few years, urban life in Xiamen, as in the West, has re-organized itself around the incorporated environment of wireless communications – they, too, are no longer late, only delayed.

After the chemical plant in Haicang had been announced, it undoubtedly became a topic of conversation in Xiamen – both in person and via mobile. Now that there’s an established record of industrial abuse in China, people know what to expect – and what to fear – from industrialization. This surely featured in those conversations. People traded what bits of information they knew for sure – and also passed along rumors. In the absence of a strong, critical press, rumors tend to flourish. That’s the price you always pay for centrally controlled distribution of information. The drive to know the truth doesn’t disappear, nor is it assuaged by propaganda; it is channeled into other forms of expression. So, as the local officials stonewalled, pressure built up – and the conversations grew more heated. Finally, someone – somewhere – composed the following text message:

“Xianglu Group joint venture has already begun investing in a benzene project. Once this kind of heavily poisonous chemical is manufactured, it will be like all of Xiamen has been hit with an atomic bomb, and Xiamen people’s lives will be full of leukemia and deformed children. We want to live, we want to be healthy! International organizations require this sort of project to be developed a distance of 100 km outside of a city. Our Xiamen is just 16 km away! For our children and grandchildren, send this message to all your Xiamen friends! For our children and grandchildren, act! Participate among 10,000 people, June 1 at 8am, opposite the municipal government building! Hand tie yellow ribbons! SMS all your Xiamen friends!”

The logic of viral media distribution is very straightforward. You find something – in this case, an SMS – and, if it excites you, your next thought is who you’d like to share it with. You filter the message against that social network we all carry around in your heads – and in the address books of or mobile handsets – then you forward the message along. And while that’s explicitly called for in this text message, it’s not at all necessary to be so explicit; when people are excited enough by something, they do it all on their own. Finding, filtering, forwarding. It’s an antique human behavior, but it’s now been accelerated to escape velocity by pervasive wireless networks. This is the engine that made YouTube such a success. And, in this case, it produced a small revolution.

The city officials in Xiamen knew about his text message – it had been forwarded about so widely it would have been difficult for them not to take note of it. They took the first, natural reaction of a censored state – and asked China Mobile to block all text messages to Xiamen mobiles which had the words “benzene”, “atomic”, “demonstration” or “leukemia” in them. By this time, however, that message had been forwarded on at least a million times; the populace of Xiamen all knew about the event, whether or not they’d received a text message. Since that didn’t work, they forbade any demonstrations on the 1st of June, then announced that work on the plant had been “postponed” – hoping the population would soon forget the issue. Another government newspaper openly attacked an individual known only by their handle – XiamenWave22, the purported author of the text message. The people-powered politics of SMS self-organization were about to collide with the power of the Chinese state.

At 8 AM on the 1st of June, a crowd began to build opposite the municipal government building in Xiamen; yellow ribbons were passed around the crowd; red banners were unfurled, proclaiming “Project Xiamen, Everyone Has a Responsibility”. At 9 AM, as if by some sudden, unspoken and spontaneous decision, the crowd – now numbering several thousand – began to march. While the police kept a watchful eye on the crowd, they did nothing to interfere – and this marked it as singular. In most situations the police would attempt to disburse an illegal demonstration such as this one, but the crowd marched peacefully, and the police did not interfere. Instead of an atmosphere of fear and violence, marchers reported an almost jubilant feel to the crowd. Shopkeepers and passers-by joined with the throng, as it grew to perhaps 5000 strong. Protests continued through the afternoon, trailing off toward the end of the day.

(Something else worth noting: the protest march was shot by someone – presumably participating in the protest – from their mobile handset. There are at least 200 million mobile handsets capable of shooting video, and all of this substantially interferes with the state’s ability to control the flow of information.)

And that was that. The national government has put the Haicang plant on permanent hold, pending a review. Municipal officials are being investigated for corruption. For now, the people of Xiamen have won their cause – though everyone touched by this event has learned a lesson. The people of Xiamen (and broadly, across China) have learned that they can self-organize against a government which provides no redress for grievances; the government has learned that although wireless communications reduce friction in social and business relations, these benefits comes at a price. Next time – and there will be a next time, for as long as the government turns a deaf ear to a people empowered by wireless communications, they will continue to use that technology to self-organize – the government might just turn off the wireless services, or censor them so heavily that protesters will adopt a secret language. Both sides have learned, and both sides will continue to adapt their behaviors to meet their ends.

If this example were specific to China, we could adopt a more sanguine point of view, like cultural anthropologists, just noting the intersection of technology and politics in a culture very different from our own. But this example is our example, these people are our people, as became abundantly clear in early December of 2005:

“Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support Leb and wog bashing day.”

This text message made its way from the hard-right racist cliques of New South Wales (such as the Australia First Party, Blood and Honour, and the Patriotic Youth League) out into the greater community of the Sutherland Shire. We all know well enough what followed – one day and two nights of rioting and revenge. Self-organizing protests do occur, even in nations which have adequate and well-tested mechanisms for the redress of grievances; all it takes is a minority sufficiently energized and empowered – with wireless technologies – to spread the word.

While the vast majority of Australians might be horrified at the results of such a spontaneous act of self-organization, the power to do so is always latent, wherever pervasive wireless networking has become part of the incorporated environment. Call it democracy, call it fascism, call it freedom, call it terrorism. The labels matter not at all. We don’t have a good name yet for just what this is; it isn’t mass action – not in the sense that we knew it in the 20th century. These are not peasants storming the barricades, nor unionists fighting private security forces at the gates of the factory. These are arisings, not uprisings. They are the unpredictable moments of emergence, sudden stirrings of self-organization. As each one occurs, we learn a little bit more about how they work. But they can not be predicted, nor can they be controlled. And that means the 21st-century – now that half of us are effectively wired into a whole – is going to be very unpredictable indeed.

III: Us Mob

In January of 2007, a reader of the political news blog Talking Points Memo, sent an email to the editor-in-chief of the blog, Josh Marshall. The reader noted that the US Attorney for his district – in Minnesota – had just been fired and replaced. US Attorneys are powerful individuals, tasked with overseeing the Federal Government’s caseload in 93 districts. Firings of US Attorneys are rare events – a total of three happened during the eight years of the Clinton administration – and are generally surrounded by a halo of press coverage. In this case – as the email noted – no explanation had been forthcoming from the US Department of Justice. The reader asked Josh Marshall if he knew anything about it. Josh didn’t, so he threw the question out to his readership – some hundred thousand people. The answer Marshall received has nearly brought down the US government.

While no reader of Talking Points Memo knew anything about the specifics of the US Attorney fired in Minnesota, other readers had just read about firings of other US Attorneys – in New Mexico, California, Arkansas – a total of eight, six of whom were fired in the same week. Such a blood-letting was unprecedented in the history of the Justice Department, and the fact that it happened without any announcement to the press seemed downright suspicious. The truth, as it has slowly been ferreted out, first by Talking Points Memo, then by the McClatchy news service, and finally, by congressional committees, seems to indicate that, beyond the normal political considerations of appointments to these highly-visible postings, the US Attorneys in question were replaced because they were not sufficiently “Bushie”, and disagreed with the administration’s line on matters larger or small.

Once the congressional committees got involved, document requests were issued to the relevant government agencies – in particular, the Justice Department. Immediately, the Justice Department resorted to a tried-and-true technique for obfuscating the truth in the face of persistent attempts to reveal it: the dreaded “document dump”. In mid-March, the Justice Department released over 3000 pages of documents at 11 PM on Friday evening – to “help” congressional investigators prepare for a hearing to be held at 10 AM on the following Tuesday morning. Document dumps have historically proven effective because they present congressional investigators with too much paperwork to be effectively analyzed; it ruins the investigators’ weekend, and inhibits their performance.

The documents were released on the Justice Department website, free for anyone to download. So Josh Marshall invited the readers of Talking Points Memo to do just that: grab any or all of the 3000 pages, begin reading, and share the results with other TPM readers, in a special area set aside on the blog. There’s a Chinese proverb: “Many hands make light work.” In a few hours, the amateur investigators working on Talking Points Memo had conducted a thorough analysis of the document dump – something that was well beyond the capability of the investigators. The document dump is now a failed strategy – because individuals can now self-organize to handle nearly any task required in the pursuit of truth.

As of today, the Bush administration and the US Congress are in a stand-off; the Congress has subpoenaed records which the administration claims are covered under “Executive Privilege” as the work-product of deliberations within the White House, and therefore won’t be shared with Congress – which has constitutionally-mandated oversight authority over all branches of government. Both sides are nearing a judicial abyss which could transform Bush’s presidency into a carbon copy of Nixon’s. How did this happen? This, too, is an unpredicted consequence of individuals connected together in pervasive networks.

We have seen how more-or-less anonymous individuals can collude to create a shared information resource such as Wikipedia; we are now seeing how a self-selected group of well-networked individuals can dedicate themselves to a specific task, all the while developing and adopting techniques that make them continuously more effective. Josh Marshall realized that he could harness the intelligence of his audience, through the network, to shine a light on the hidden corners of the Bush Administration. In the aftermath of this scandal, we can all repeat Josh’s experiment. And we will.

In 2007, with half of humanity wired into the network, there are a lot of different techniques in practice, constantly being refined, and they’re being shared widely. Every time one of those techniques succeeds wildly – anywhere – it is rapidly replicated across the entire length of the network. Political groups of all flavors and sizes have learned the lesson of Talking Points Memo, just as Chinese protesters have learned the lesson of Xiamen, and Kerala fisherman have learned how to become their own market-makers.

There are three billion nodes on this network now. Three billion highly intelligent, highly active nodes, each optimizing their own behavior, their group behavior, and the behavior of the network. The network itself is relatively unimportant; the services which carriers and ISPs are queuing up to offer don’t matter a good-god-damn, because services mean nothing to the users of the network. The connection of individuals is everything.

Back in 1995, LambdaMOO creator Pavel Curtis informed us that, “People are the killer app.” But somehow we still don’t believe him. We stubbornly believe that there is some magic inside the network itself, a quintessence within the wiring, the routers, the transponders and repeaters, that make the network something more than the sum of its parts. But this has never been true, nor will it ever be true. The value of the network is entirely in its ability to connect us together. Only insofar as a service makes it easier to connect people together – a service, like, say, SMS – will that service be adopted by the users of the network. Digital social networks such as MySpace and Facebook hold out a tantalizing promise of greater connectivity, but so far that promise has gone entirely unrealized. We don’t need them, and we never have. All we need is the means to connect. We’re perfectly able to handle all the rest.

What’s more, once individuals have adapted to the incorporated environment of the network, they resist all attempts to block or censor the network. This is a lesson that Telstra is learning right now, as they attempt to use a combination of economic and political influence to dictate the future direction of Australian broadband. What Telstra has encountered – to its great surprise – is a population who has learned the lessons of the network, and who are capable of out-thinking, out-flanking and out-competing a large, centralized telecoms firm. It won’t be very long now until the individuals on the network start to build their own networks – from wireless mesh technologies such as Meraki, or WiMax, or something entirely new and unexpected – and wrest the final control of the network away from the incumbent carriers who futilely try to steer a ship that they don’t even realize they no longer control. A company can set its own tariff rates, or build out a high-speed infrastructure, but that is not the network. The network is us mob, a mass of individuals connected together in ever-evolving configurations of purpose, with ever-expanding capabilities.

Our capabilities have grown so enormously, so quickly, that all institutions constituted in earlier times, around older and now quite frankly antique ideas of social organization, will be very hard-pressed to adapt to us mob. At the very least, governments will tumble, and businesses will crumble. This is not the hippie-dippy anarcho-syndicalism predicted by Stuart Brand or Ted Nelson or any of the first generation of Internet gurus; this is something more raw, more vital and more dangerous. Us mob still don’t know our own strength; we haven’t really flexed our muscles yet. When we do, there’ll be quite a dust-up. Things will come crashing down: some on purpose, and some quite by accident. This can’t be avoided: the future is entirely unpredictable, contingent upon the spontaneous emergence of behaviors we’ve never seen before, behaviors which will spread like wildfire, transforming all three billion of us nearly instantaneously.

It seems apocalyptic. It seems impossible. But it is already happening. We have so many examples we can point to now – beyond just the few I’ve covered here – that we must admit something new is being born. A new social organization is emerging, thoroughly global, and ignorant of class or race. There’s some cause for hope in that. But the near future is going to be so different from the recent past that we will lack reference points. It will seem as though all of culture is coming to a short, sharp end. It is not. But we do not yet understand what is rising to replace the world we know.

For those of you who may have noticed the new embedded player that YouTube has been gradually rolling out over the last two weeks — have you noticed anything missing? Something so vital, so essential to what YouTube is, that you’ve searched around their new interface looking for it?

I’m talking about the “Share” button. The one feature that made YouTube a star. The one, absolutely indispensable, must-have interface affordance.

And now, as near as I can tell, it seems to be gone. Sure, you can embed, and you can get the URL and copy it to the clipboard, but none of that – none of it – has any of the power of just tapping on the “Share” button, selecting a few friends, and forwarding the video along.

It’s as if – I can only imagine – they have purposely set out to destroy their business. The entire reason that YouTube exists is because they made it so incredibly easy to find, filter and forward videos along from friend to friend. Anything, however small – and this isn’t small, it’s huge – that gets in the way of sharing will slow YouTube’s growth. Perhaps even ruin it.

This can’t be happening. They can’t have missed this. It’s too important, too significant, too central to what YouTube is.

We all live in hierarchies. That’s our curse as primates. And always, ever always, status has been conferred on those in the know. To be among the cognoscenti is to possess a mystique, an allure, which confers authority and commands a high position in human hierarchies. Marketers understand this. Advertisers understand this. Now it’s time the rest of us learn it. Or rather, it’s time that we learn that this is the main force driving our social networks.

II.

If you want to understand the emergent behavior of “always-on” users, observe what they already do. The ad-hoc techniques developed by the swarm of network users to manage the avalanche of media inevitably become the automated techniques of tomorrow. The first and most important of these emerging techniques is known today as “link sharing,” but the simplicity of this term belies its significance. In order to understand how important link sharing is, we must take a look at the ad-hoc behavior which it formalizes.

If the surveys are to be believed, we each spend up to two hours a day working with our electronic mail. Some of this electronic mail is dedicated to the minutiae of our business lives – meetings, planning, and execution of commercial activities – but, for many of us, it is also a continuously reinforced connection to our social networks of friends and family. Some of this correspondence is the simple reaffirmation of contact, but, increasingly, these emails contain little more than a URL to some piece of network-accessible content, be it a web page, or an MP3 audio file, or a video. They’re good for a few minute’s diversion, and if we like what we see, we’re bound to pass it along.

Social networks, flexible and dynamic, constantly reconfigure themselves based on the perceived value of relationships of each member within the network to every other member. Laid out against this is another metric: expertise. One friend may be an omniscient source of information on IT issues, while another might be expert in dance culture, another, television, and so on. No one connection absorbs all of the attention within a social network; in an ideal situation, everyone contributes something utterly unique, drawn from their own strengths. Furthermore, because our digital selves are all fundamentally egomaniacs, clamoring for attention, recognition, and ascendancy in the social hierarchy, we’re constantly competing for attention within our social networks, each constantly trying to outdo one another, with the newest, hippest, coolest thing. This constant struggle to maintain our position in an ever-changing social order produces a kind of selection pressure – not unlike biological evolution – that quickly winnows winners from losers. (Tabloid newspapers have been fighting this same battle for a hundred and fifty years, but now the capability – and, consequently, the conflict – has become pervasive.)

III.

What are the observable characteristics of this behavior? It breaks down into three basic domains of activity:

A) Finding. A successful competitor for our limited attention knows how to find just those bits of information which are sure to excite interest. These individuals have deep knowledge in narrow fields – we might call them “nanoexperts.” A nanoexpert maintains connections into their community of interest; that’s their passion, and the wellspring of their capability.

B) Filtering. An expert absorbs a lot of information, and much of it is judged to be of little value – perhaps even annoying – to the social network which the expert serves. An expert knows how to judge not just the quality of information, but its relevance. This activity is not automatable; while Google can tell you if a website is popular, based on the number of links into it, Google can’t digest a tidbit of data and tell you if it’s of any significance. Salience is a characteristic of sapience. A good filter – like a good editor – improves the quality of information by cutting it down to size. (Sites like Digg, where users vote articles into front-page relevance, represent an attempt to automate filtering. But Digg displays no real expertise, and won’t until it dissolves into an ever-increasing folksonomy of baby Diggs.)

C) Forwarding. Once something has been found, once it has been weighed, it needs to be distributed. This is perhaps the most difficult (and most social) part of the process. We could easily blast everything we find to everyone we know. But we’d make a lot of enemies in the process, and destroy our rank in every social network. Instead, we dole out expertise parsimoniously, choosing where and when to reveal it, in whatever manner best supports and extends our social standing. Cognoscenti maintain their value in a social network as much by withholding information as by revealing it.

These three activities – the “Three Fs” of finding, filtering and forwarding – scaled up to the swarm of a billion Internet users, describe the world we see today. This is more than the “death of marketing,” more than a world where a few “cool-hunters” detect and amplify the trends of the mass culture. In this new social order, there is no mass market, no mass media, and no mass mind: instead, there are networks of experts, each feeding into collective networks of knowledge, social networks which both within themselves, and, pitted against each other, struggle to raise their standing in the world.

As we move into a world where these ad-hoc techniques become formalized, supported by tools such as del.icio.us, Flock and – perhaps most significantly – Yahoo!, these link-sharing networks will become the individualized equivalent of the mainstream media. More and more of our precious attention is being taken up by content that’s been forwarded to us, and every day, in every way, we’re getting better at finding, filtering and forwarding. How the media industries of the present day – predicated on mass communication to mass audiences – negotiate the transition into a world of microaudiences, each fiercely guarded by an army of ever-vigilant nanoexperts, remains an open question.